Unnecessary War

[Moses]

Story last updated at 11:34 PM on June 7, 2005

Supporters of Iraq war should volunteer to serve
Scott Sandiger



Drago Tesanovich (Letters, "Iraq war won't stop until we demand it," June 6) is correct in his analysis of one of the blackest chapters in American foreign policy history. This nation was manipulated and dragged into a war that simply did not have to be fought, by an administration plotting to invade Iraq at any cost, many months before a single bomb had fallen.

 
The spineless American press may be largely ignoring the glaring proof that President Bush and company dragged this nation into an utterly unnecessary war, but the British press isn't so compliant. The Downing Street memos are direct, blunt and d**ning evidence presented to Prime Minister Tony Blair's government by British intelligence that the Bush administration was determined to go to war with Iraq, and would manipulate any information in order to achieve that aim.

Sensational, powerful and treasonous proof was dropped on Blair's desk to sadly confirm what millions of us knew all along back in early 2003: That no matter what we did, Bush would get his war. He did, it's been the disaster many predicted and the cheerleaders for this catastrophe have no more "justifications" to hide behind.

They've been fully exposed. If they still think the costs have been worth it, I suggest they stop their tough-talking hypocrisy and volunteer to go to Iraq to man the checkpoints or battle the thousands of new terrorists our actions have created. Otherwise, they should shut up. Oh, and they should feel embarrassed - very, very embarrassed.

Scott Sandiger

---

Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, June 8, 2005

[Moses]

WHY MUST I GO TO LONDON...[/size]
TO GET SOME TRUTH ABOUT AMERICA?

By: Jim Moore


With a few rare exceptions, the newspaper and TV coverage in the United States of world events is a disgrace, bordering on disaster.

The major print and broadcast news media are, for the most part, the pet poodles of politics, and especially this administration, to be kept well fed, stroked occasionally, thrown an extra bone now and then, and whipped into shape when their yapping gets too loud.

So where are we, the American public, supposed to get world news that is somewhere near accurate, fairly close to the truth, and is, as Fox news talking heads like to say, “News that’s fair, balanced, and unafraid.” That in itself is worth a smile. “Unfair, out of balance, and scared to death” is more like it.

And Fox News is hardly in that category by itself. What I gather is that Fox, unconsciously following in the footsteps of Avis, perhaps tries harder. I may give them that.

So why, then, do we have to rely on London to break with a story that should be making headlines across America, but is hardly an insert, if run at all? We shouldn’t have to, but we’re stuck with it.


This concerns a document called the Downing Street Memo, which finally broke on television last night. This inflammatory memorandum describes a high level meeting that Prime Minister Tony Blair had with his aides in which they contradicted the Bush administration’s assertions to Congress and the American people that it had considered all other options before going to war with Iraq.

Not so, say the minutes of the Blair meeting, which contended that we had plans to attack Iraq long before we actually did. This, of course, means that war with Iraq was a fait accompli, bolstered by phony intelligence, and that the WMD’s in Iraq, or other claims, were spurious or incidental.

Another incriminating point exposed in the Downing Street Memo puts to rest the raging debate we’ve had for nearly two years that the information we got about WMD’s in Iraq was an intelligence “failure”, or manipulation of information to support a case for war.

Actually, says the memo, it was neither. Rather, it was “fixing” the facts around the “already decided” decision to go to war. Put another way, it was massaging the facts to fit the policy, instead of forming a policy based on the known facts.

Or, put yet another way, it was a treacherous deceit played on the America public by this administration to involve us in an illegal and unnecessary war--- by lying our way in.

Where does this d**ning Downing Street Memo stand now? It has set off an intensive investigation. A coalition of American “Downing Street” investigators are currently calling for an inquiry in the House of Representatives that would call for a formal investigation by the Judiciary Committee.

Their contention is plain enough: the President of the United States actively engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the Congress and the American public on the “need” for attacking Iraq. And the release of the Downing Street memo gives new and compelling evidence that that is exactly what happened.

Because the Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war, the administration’s deception amounts to an assault on one provision of the Constitution; and that assault constitutes a High Crime under Section 4 of that founding document. How will all this shake out?

We shall see.

Meanwhile, my personal criticism of much of our media still stands. I find it difficult to believe that the American public must rely on what transpires at a high level meeting in London to find out what’s going on in our own backyard.

I doubt if the Brits would take too kindly to it if they had to wait for a Rose Garden Memo to find out how far Tony Blair had to bend over backwards to please George Bush.

 

"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."

[Moses]

Whose culture of life are we talking about?

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

By Molly Ivins

As a longtime fan of both George Bushes’ eccentric grasp of English, I naturally enjoyed this gem from W.: “See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” (Bush in Greece, N.Y., May 24, once more explaining his Social Security plan to a town hall meeting of perfectly average citizens, except they had all been pre-screened to allow only those who agree with him into the hall.)

“Catapulting the propaganda” would explain his performance at the press opportunity that same day at which he appeared surrounded by babies born from frozen embryos. He used the phrase “culture of life” at least 27 dozen times (I think I exaggerate, but maybe not). “The use of federal dollars to destroy life is something I simply do not support,” he said to the press the following day.

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, federal dollars are being used to destroy life at pretty good clip because Bush decided to wage an entirely elective war against a country that presented little or no threat to us. And according to the Downing Street memo, he d**n well knew it, too.

The destruction of life in Iraq is more dramatic than taking a blastocyst smaller than a pinpoint out of a petri dish. The 1,600 American dead so far - not much culture of life there. The 15,000 wounded, many of them irreparably - not so good there, either. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths are all over the lot - a British medical journal claimed 100,000 last year, the Iraq Body Count Web site says between 21,000 and 25,000. The U.S./U.N. sanctions are widely believed to have killed hundreds of thousands, most of them babies, even after the Oil for Food Program was instituted.

The New York Times reports that the doctors in Iraq are now being threatened by insurgents and so are fleeing what was a showcase system under Saddam. [In fact, 100% of the doctors are reportedly severely depressed, and want to leave Iraq-- willing to go anywhere, and do anything, giving up the practice of medicine] I think we’d all have to agree, so far there’s no progress on bringing a culture of life to Iraq.

What I don’t get is the disconnect in Bush’s mind. One must assume he figures in Iraq, “You gotta break eggs to make an omelette,” or something akin. He said at the photo-op with the adorable children who had been produced from frozen embryos and adopted by other parents, “The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo.”

Nonsense. Fertility treatments that help couples to have children leave far too many excess embryos for all of them to be adopted. They are simply discarded by the laboratories, thrown out. What in the world is he talking about?

Seems to me the anti-abortion people are getting as nutty as the gun lobby, which lets cop-killer bullets on the street, wants to allow .50 caliber rifles that can bring down an airplane and stops efforts to close loopholes that let dealers sell to terrorists and criminals. Plus a bunch of other nutcase stuff that is not only harmful to society, but opposed by the great majority of the American people. Anti-abortion people are even going after the process of judicial bypass for girls who cannot fulfill the parental consent restriction.

Look, 60 percent of the American people are in favor of funding stem cell research. Do we have a First Amendment issue here? Is this the case of a few people imposing their religious views on everybody else? I don’t know enough about stem cell research to tell you that it will produce miracle cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases, as some scientists claim. But it’s not only worth a shot, it would be criminal not to do it. The people who are ill are here, now, human beings in terrible suffering.

Bush is prepared to use his first-ever veto. Didn’t stop the bankruptcy bill, didn’t stop all those tax cuts for the very rich, didn’t stop that gross agriculture bill - but this he will veto. He says we will “cross a critical ethical line by creating new incentives for the ongoing destruction of emerging human life.” And he doesn’t think starting an unnecessary war was crossing a critical ethical line?

It’s the old slippery slope argument. Look, all of law is a process of drawing lines on slippery slopes. The difference between misdemeanor theft and felony theft is one penny. The difference between misdemeanor and felony drug possession is one gram. For that matter, the difference between a pig and a hog is one pound. We’re always drawing distinctions, and it is necessary to do so - hunting rifles, OK; .50 caliber rifles, don’t be a fool.
This is a don’t-be-a-fool argument. “Culture of life”? Whose life?

---

Molly Ivins

[Moses]

Papers Reach Iraq Boiling Point?
By Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher
Posted on June 8, 2005, Printed on June 8, 2005
www.alternet.org/story/22184/

Suddenly there seems to be something in the air -- the smell of death? Or something in the water -- blood? In any case, this past week, widely scattered newspaper editorialists roused themselves from seeming acceptance of the continuing slaughter in Iraq to voice, for the first time in many cases, outright condemnation of the war.

While still refusing to use the "W" word in offering advice to Dubya -- that is, "withdrawal" -- some at least are finally using the "L" word, for lies.

Memorial Day seemed to bring out the anger in some editorial writers, who at that time are normally afraid to say anything about a current conflict that might seem to slight the brave sacrifices of men and women, past and present. Maybe it was the steadily growing Iraqi and American death count, or the increasing examples of White House "disassembling" (to quote the president this week), or the horror stories emerging from Gitmo.

Or perhaps it's a hidden trend that might have even more impact than the rest: the writing on the wall spelled out by plunging military recruitment rates. That only adds to the sense that, overall, the Iraq adventure has made America far less safe in this world.

For whatever reason, it's possible that more than a few editorial pages may finally be on the verge of saying "enough is enough." Perhaps they might even catch up with their readers, as the latest Gallup polls find that 57% feel the war is "not worth it," and nearly as many want us to start pulling out troops, not sending more of them.

There were numerous signs of editorial unrest in the past week, too many to cite. The Sun of Baltimore, in its Memorial Day editorial, declared: "If the president truly wished to honor their memory, he would demonstrate to the nation that the government that has botched so much of the war at least has some inkling as to how to draw it to a successful conclusion -- so that the dead will not have died in vain." The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called Iraq "an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns. ... President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes."

Steve Chapman, syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune (and generally considered a conservative), on Thursday declared: "The dilemma the U.S. faces in fighting the insurgents is that military methods are not enough to solve the problem and may make it worse. If the movement is a reaction to the U.S. military presence, keeping American troops in Iraq amounts to fighting a fire with kerosene.

"That explains why the longer we stay, the more suicide attacks we face. And it suggests that the only feasible strategy is to withdraw from Iraq and turn the fight over to the Iraqi government. The alternative is to stay and keep doing what we've been doing for the last two years. But that approach has shown no signs of fostering success. It only promises to raise the cost of failure."

But perhaps the most powerful denunciation came from an unlikely source, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. An editorial in that Hearst paper this past Wednesday, just after Memorial Day, really thundered, and deserves reprinting here:

"President Bush was among the 260,000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery when he said it. But it was clear Monday that the president was referring to the more than 1,650 Americans killed to date in Iraq when he said, 'We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists.'

"Bush insists on clinging to the thoroughly discredited notion that there was any connection between the old Iraqi regime -- no matter how lawless and brutal -- and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"U.S. military action against an Afghan regime that harbored al-Qaida was a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq was not.

"As of Memorial Day 2003, Bush had declared major combat operations at an end, predicted that weapons of mass destruction would be found and that U.S. forces were in the process of stabilizing Iraq. One hundred sixty U.S. troops had died.

"The U.S. death toll has grown more than tenfold. No weapons of mass destruction were found. More than 700 Iraqis have been killed since Iraq's new government was formed April 28.

"Bush said of the insurgents at a news conference yesterday, 'I believe the Iraqi government is plenty capable of dealing with them.'

"Of course, this is the same president that assured the world that military intervention in Iraq was a last resort and that the United States would make every effort to avoid war through diplomacy. Giving lie to that as well is the so-called Downing Street War Memo, which shows that as early as July 2002, 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD ... the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'

"Perhaps all presidents' remarks in military graveyards are by nature self-serving. But few have been so callow as the president's using the deaths of U.S. troops in his unjustified war as justification for its continuance."

At the close of the editorial online, the paper polled readers, asking if they thought it was "time to begin the careful but quick withdrawal of American forces from Iraq?" These highly unscientific surveys usually should be ignored. But the result in this case, from over 2,600 votes, was so one-sided it deserves mention: Nearly 92% called for the beginning of a pullout.

---

Greg Mitchell ([e-mail]) is the editor of E&P.

[Moses]

(Swans - June 6, 2005)  RECRUITING SOLDIERS for the finest military in the world appears to have hit a serious bump in the road. As more and more Americans -- now a solid majority -- have come to realize that the war in Iraq was ill-founded (no WMDs, no link with Al Qaeda, Iraq did not attack us, oil is not forthcoming, and prices at the pump remain high), moms and pops all over the country don't want to see their kids get killed or maimed for what is increasingly considered an unnecessary adventure with no end in sight. They don't question the lofty goal of exporting freedom and democracy but they'd rather not have it done with the blood of their sons and daughters. In ever larger numbers, parents are discouraging their children to enlist. Perhaps this is what former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger had in mind when he commented at a meeting of the US-India Business Council on June 1, 2005: "For the U.S. to crusade in every part of the world simultaneously to spread democracy may be beyond our capacity." It takes a lot of money and boots on the ground -- both getting in short supply -- to feed the Empire...

THE BOOTS ain't coming. The Army and the Marines don't meet their quotas. Resourceful recruiters are resorting to desperate tricks -- falsifying diplomas, ignoring drug charges and other petty crimes of potential recruits, etc. In addition, the military, thinking long term, is aggressively targeting kids in high schools, middle schools, even elementary schools, with promises of college education and secure careers -- which is blatantly false, as Jennifer Wedekind reports in "The Children's Crusade: Military programs move into middle schools to fish for future soldiers" (In These Times, June 3, 2005): "[o]n average, two-thirds of recruits never receive college funding and only 15 percent graduate with a four-year degree. As for a 'secure' career, the unemployment rate for veterans is three times higher than non-veterans," adds Wedekind. Meanwhile, pundits and politicians alike raise the issue of the draft -- the specter of mandatory service -- but this does not look quite practical. Imagine boomers' reaction to the imposition of the draft... It's one thing to have volunteers wage unnecessary wars -- that does not affect them in particular. But let the sons and daughters of middle- and upper-class boomers become fodder for cannon, and you can rest assured the antiwar movement will explode, the streets fill with masses of demonstrators within months of the reinstitution of the draft, and they'll heatedly demand that the sons and daughters of the powers-that-be joined the fray.

PUT IT THIS WAY: Take Nancy Pelosi, the oh-so liberal representative of San Francisco and House Minority Leader who is gung-ho on Iran, who wants the forces of good to stay in Iraq till the job is completed, who'd go to Syria at a moment's notice, etc., and tell her that her kids will be a part of the contingent... Tell this to Dean, and Cheney, and, Mr. Bush... "Hey, Mr. Bush, charming daughters you have, just gorgeous human beings, beautiful flowers... Know what, they're going to Iran with my son and daughter, you hear...or my son and daughter stay home." I think they'll reach out to the prison population (that's over 2,000,000 people) before the draft is reinstated. They'll offer inmates freedom after serving say, five years in the military, like they are doing with poor immigrants -- give us three years and you get citizenship (well, if you're still alive). Funny that they have not thought of that yet...

THERE IS A CRUCIBLE though, and it has little to do with terrorism and nothing at all with spreading freedom and democracy. Let's see what else Mr. Kissinger had to say on June 1, 2005: "The great game is developing again . . . . The amount of energy is finite, up to now in relation to demand, and competition for access to energy can become the life and death for many societies. It would be ironic if the direction of pipelines and locations become the modern equivalent of the colonial disputes of the 19th century." Evidently, if we keep thinking in 19th century terms, which apparently we do, then the unnecessary war in Iraq is actually quite necessary. The U.S., with about 4 percent of the world population consumes 25 percent of all energy resources. So long as we want to keep our "non-negotiable" way of life humming and puffing along we're going to need boots on the ground. Liberals and conservative alike are fully aware of the crucible. It'd be good to see Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush address the nation together (like Hillary and Newt) and level the facts with the American people: "Friends, we send the kids to die so that you all can enjoy your unsustainable way of life. If you do not want war you need to change your way of life. Do you want to change your way of life?" Lib-labs or fundies, we are all Americans now.

[Moses]

Administration's Offenses Impeachable
by Robert Shetterly; Bangor Daily News; June 05, 2005


Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago:

A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication.

So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib.

It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place.

What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they stand up now for the truth.

Richard Nixon was impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in. William Cohen, a young Maine Republican, played an important role for the prosecution in those proceedings. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex with an intern. Now we have the irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United States to war. The intelligence wasn't flawed. The weapons weren't hidden. Our elected leaders were lying.

Democracy, like any sound relationship between people, is built on trust. We trust our leaders to tell the truth so that the consent that we give them is honestly informed. If the consent is won through manipulation, propaganda, fear, or lies, the basis of our democracy has been subverted. It is no longer democracy at all, but we continue to call it that because we have not the courage or stamina to demand its overhaul.

We live a lie when we fail to hold leaders accountable for their lies. By not calling now for impeachment, we are saying that we condone hypocrisy, pseudo-democracy, and murdering thousands of Americans and Iraqis for strategic control of energy resources that we have no right to. Patriotism demands that we insist on the ideals of democracy, not that we support the "leaders" who cynically destroy them.

What's curious is why anyone like me should have to even point this out. Don't our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they content to continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands? Do they think they can lie to history, too. Do they think that this little Iraq problem will somehow just go away, that the courageous resistance to the United States occupation will give up and hand Bush the keys to the oil wells? Do they think that any of the grave crises facing the world now - energy consumption, global warming, species extinction - can be solved by lying about them?

We are living in an age of no accountability. It's also an age upon which may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One should not bet one's future on people who abjure responsibility. The first courageous step is to come to terms with what we know is true: America's president lied to America's people to create an unnecessary war. I ask Sens. Snowe and Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take that step. Begin impeachment proceedings. It's really no more or less than their duty. It's also the first step toward restoring America's integrity.

---

Robert Shetterly is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine.

[Moses]

www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/letters/sfl-pbmail789xjun03,0,2770165.story?coll=sfla-news-letters

War in Iraq has gone too far

Julius Druckman
Boynton Beach

June 3, 2005

This war in Iraq has just gone too far and it's now time to start talking impeachment.

With all the evidence available, and the new information emerging regarding the lies, twisted truths and selective intelligence that brought us into an unprovoked and unnecessary war, it's time for the nation to hold responsible the man sitting where the buck stops at the White House. I find it untenable that we would almost impeach one president for engineering and condoning a break-in and impeach another for a sexual liaison, but not a man who started a deadly war based on lies, deceit and avarice.
This war has killed and maimed thousands of our young people, tens of thousands of innocent civilians (whom we're supposed to be protecting), and has earned our nation the scorn of the world community.

But we give President George W. Bush a free pass, and another term. Dragging our nation down the path of evil and d**nation is not only an impeachable offense, it's treasonous.

This country needs changes in our foreign policy that begin with the impeachment of Bush; the sooner the better.

Even the first lady is at odds with her husband's policy at times.
"There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military actions." Sen John Kerry was right. Yes, just look at the mess they made of it. Lies, gross incompetence, reckless disregard of the Constitution, treason and an impending civil war in Iraq.

Impeachment time.

Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

[Moses]

startribune.com


Last update: June 6, 2005 at 12:14 PM

Editorial: Memorial Day/Praise bravery, seek forgiveness



Published May 30, 2005

Nothing young Americans can do in life is more honorable than offering themselves for the defense of their nation. It requires great selflessness and sacrifice, and quite possibly the forfeiture of life itself. On Memorial Day 2005, we gather to remember all those who gave us that ultimate gift. Because they are so fresh in our minds, those who have died in Iraq make a special claim on our thoughts and our prayers.

In exchange for our uniformed young people's willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don't expect untruths from those in power. But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse.

The "smoking gun," as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he'd just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration's intentions toward Iraq.

At a time when the White House was saying it had "no plans" for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been "a perceptible shift in attitude" in Washington. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade.

Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post on May 22, provides further evidence that the administration did, indeed, fix the intelligence on Iraq to fit a policy it had already embraced: invasion and regime change. Just four days before Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, Pincus writes, the National Security Council staff "put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims" about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak. Moreover, Pincus says, "as the war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs." But no one at high ranks in the administration would listen to them.

On the day before Bush's speech, the CIA's Berlin station chief warned that the source for some of what Bush would say was untrustworthy. Bush said it anyway. He based part of his most important annual speech to the American people on a single, dubious, unnamed source. The source was later found to have fabricated his information.

Also comes word, from the May 19 New York Times, that senior U.S. military leaders are not encouraged about prospects in Iraq. Yes, they think the United States can prevail, but as one said, it may take "many years."

As this bloody month of car bombs and American deaths -- the most since January -- comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their bravery and sacrifice. But let us also ask their forgiveness for sending them to a war that should never have happened. In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious.

---

© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.