The Senate reports on Bush's deceit of the American people

Last month, the Senate released a report on whether public statements regarding Iraq by U.S. officials were substantiated by intelligence information. Is this really news? I was connecting the dots on the Bush administration's campaign of deceit back in August of 2005. I'm returning to the topic now because the evidence of this keeps piling on.

In 2002, Bush was unequivocal about Iraq "seeking nuclear weapons." He stated on October 7 that "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." The de facto President, Dick Cheney, was even more adamant when he said on August 26 of the same year that, "They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago … we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

Yet the intelligence of the time evidenced that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes. The only evidence that Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program was the supposed uranium shopping in Africa and the aluminum tubes which were supposedly for weaponizing uranium. The uranium shopping was discounted by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and the aluminum tubes had already been determined to not meet the tolerances required for centrifuging uranium.

Even then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was noted for speaking in riddles and contorting his responses, was remarkably clear when he asserted that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction facilities were underground. He told the House Armed Services Committee of those facilities on September 18, 2002, that "a good many are underground and deeply buried" and so "not … vulnerable to attack from the air." The truth of the matter, the Senate report found, was that there was no intelligence-community report that supported Rumsfeld's claim.

In spite of the report's substantial evidence that the Bush administration twisted and hyped intelligence regarding the threat Iraq posed to the U.S. before Bush invaded her, Republican Senators stonewalled the public release of the report for years. Only two of the seven Republicans on the fifteen-member Senate panel supported the report. When the five dissenting Republicans failed to prevent the release of the report, they then tried to delete most of its conclusions. The GOP clearly does not feel that Bush should be held accountable for intentionally deceiving the American people into an illegitimate, disastrous war.

Obama's foundation of sincerity

As you can see by reviewing the history of this blog, I've reserved judgment on Senator Barack Obama's candidacy. I knew very little about him to base a judgment on early in the primary elections. I learned more and more about him as his campaign progressed and I became very impressed with Obama by the end of the primary elections.

One of the top two factors that I liked about him is that he struck me as being sincere in his politics. There was no double-talk and spin in his words. When questioned, he would respond head-on rather than trying to dodge the questions, as is altogether too common among candidates. I could sense his commitment to his stances on the issues. Obama seemed to be the most authentic candidate I've seen in some time.

Unfortunately, cracks have recently begun to show in this foundation. Many months ago -- before it became evident that he would raise so much funds for his campaign privately -- Obama said he would use public financing for his campaign. Now that it looks like he will likely surpass half a billion dollars of fund raising for this campaign, Obama decided to opt out of public financing.

I have no problem with this decision; it would've been political malpractice to stick with his original position. It's Obama's justification for the change in his position on public financing that I find weak. If the public financing system is broken, why did he originally support it? Obama would've seemed much more sincere had he instead simply said, "I changed my mind; it would've been unfair to my supporters to not fully leverage their contributions."

To add to that, Obama stated his support for the update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that is currently before the House of Representatives. It's bad enough that President Bush considers himself above the law when it comes to the FISA. Now Obama favors law that removes more of the right to privacy that the Bill of Rights gave us.

Yet he also claims that he will fight to strip a provision granting immunity to telecommunication companies when the bill comes to a vote in the Senate next week. If Obama opposes the terms of the bill, why would he state his support for it? I'm having difficulty finding the sincerity of this seeming contradiction.

These two issues alone are not enough for me to denounce Obama. However, if this is a trend that continues, it will certainly lead me to question my support for his candidacy. I hope the future brings us consistent stances from Obama that reinforce his persona of sincerity.

McCain denounces the separation of church and state

By saying "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation," Senator John McCain made it clear last fall that he doesn't understand what the Establishment Clause means. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Yet McCain ignorantly goes on to claim of our Founding Fathers that "they didn't mean, in my view, separation of church and state." It's as if McCain lives in a parallel universe to W's Backwards World.

Pulling the puppet strings

Unfortunately, the Blogspot column is too narrow to display a funny poster I saw. Using the power of PhotoShop, it explains the one problem that prevents McCain from being the perfect president. If you're up for a laugh, it's worth the click to check out the Weekend at McCain's poster.

This just in...

CNN is reporting that Senator Barack Obama is resigning from his church. I didn't know you have to "resign" from a church. If so, I owe someone a letter of resignation. I thought you just stop attending. Who would I address that letter to -- the church's HR department?

The impending end of the war in Iraq

In this campaign season, one of the questions on voters' minds is how much longer will the Iraq war continue? Senator John McCain has voiced support for the possibility of maintaining military troops in Iraq for as long as a century. Both Senators Obama and Clinton would withdraw our troops as rapidly as prudence allows after taking the Oval Office, with some minor variations of what that means between the two of them. What none of them are talking about is that the time is actually much more cut and dried than any of them would want you to know.

President Bush acquired his authority to invade Iraq under the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. Remember it? That's the one both Senators Clinton and McCain voted in favor of in 2002.

What the resolution says is that congress supports the president to "strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts." It's not as though Bush needed any encouragement but he does need the relevant Security Council resolution. There is a series of them which approves the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), the last of which was the Security Council resolution dated December 18, 2007. With it, the council "decides to extend the [UNAMI] mandate as set forth in that resolution until 31 December 2008." Finally it decides to remain "seized of the matter."

Whether the council remains seized or not, the administration is not requesting an extension of the resolution for 2009. That leaves the UN multinational forces, led by the US military, less than seven months to wrap up the war in Iraq. Considering Bush makes it crystal clear that the American forces will not be withdrawn from Iraq while he's commander in chief, it's unclear what authority he will use to perpetuate the war into 2009. If he follows his standard operating procedures, his authority is certain to be some grotesque contortion of US and international law.

Measured in blood and treasure

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle." This is a claim you'd expect to hear from a critic of Bush's foreign policy. But this was written by a former senior department of defense official, Joseph J. Collins. In the paper, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath, he goes on to say, "Our status as a moral leader has been damaged by the war, the subsequent occupation of a Muslim nation, and various issues concerning the treatment of detainees."

The latest of the Institute for National Strategic Studies' occasional papers published by the National Defense University Press, this one was released this month. The paper notes that the biggest cost of the war to the treasury is yet to come. "No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," Collins wrote. And contrary to Bush's justification du jour for invading Iraq, he reports that our efforts in Iraq have caused it to become an "incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East."

Americans are in agreement that until recently, things have gone very poorly in Iraq. But since the 'surge,' the situation in Iraq appears to be improving. Does that mean there's light at the end of the tunnel? Unfortunately, Collins believes that "despite impressive progress in security during the surge, the outcome of the war is in doubt." He states that, "It is arguable whether the Iraqis will develop the wherewithal to create ethnic reconciliation and build a coherent national government." For many analysts, the war looks like a 'can't win.'

The central finding of this study is that U.S. efforts in Iraq were hobbled by a set of faulty assumptions, a flawed planning effort, and a continuing inability to create security conditions in Iraq that could have fostered meaningful advances in stabilization, reconstruction, and governance.

Collins lays the blame at the feet of the President for the impact made by "senior U.S. national security officials" when they "exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect." They not only treated our allies this way but they even treated our own Congress autocratically.

Collins has substantial credibility to make such claims. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. He retired in 1998 as a Colonel in the United States Army after 28 years of service. He was also a Special Assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. He makes Bush's claims that the war in Iraq is not a debacle ring hollow. Hopefully America now recognizes the folly of choosing war.