Bush Campaigns on Our Dollar
Bush and company are using our tax dollars to fund a new public relations offensive meant to prop up his sagging poll numbers. Instead of working to defend our nation, they are working to defend Bush from an as yet unnamed democratic rival in 2004. Instead of admitting to mistakes in the Iraq war plan, they're working to convince Americans that Bush never makes mistakes.
Meanwhile, five US soldiers have been killed in Iraq this week and several injured. The Pentagon in the past has called such deaths "militarily insignificant," something Brit Hume of FOX News suggested when he falsely claimed a soldier had a greater chance of dying in California than Iraq. He pointed out that 6.6 people are murdered daily in California versus 1.7 troops in Iraq, but neglected to consider that 150,000 troops constitute a far smaller population than the 34.5 million Californians, giving a US soldier in Iraq a 46-time greater chance of being killed each day. Claiming that troop deaths are insignificant overall is like saying the 3,000 deaths on 9/11 are insignificant since more than 5,500 people die daliy in the US. Can you imagine the outcry if a democrat had been the first to call troop deaths insignificant? Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter and their ilk would sink their fangs into the poor fellow, shake him, and stomp on his lifeless body. As they should. It's a despicable thing to say.
You can visit the CNN site to learn more about the soldiers who have died in Iraq. Most are men in their early twenties. It is painful to see the smiling faces and realize that no one will see that smile again. While the average American reflects on the loss of these soldiers on Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, someone else reflects on it every single day. Our empathy makes it excruciating to assert that those soldiers died fighting a war that should not have happened.
Yesterday Cheney preached a fire and brimstone sermon about how Bush the savior launched this war to keep us free from the clutches of the great satan Saddam and averted Armageddon. Bush and Cheney never squander an opportunity to drag out the bloody corpses of 9/11 and wave them in front of us, trying to shock us into support. But there new corpses crowd us on the other side: the ghosts of the more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians who have died in this conflict and the 381 coalition soldiers. That total is more than double the deaths on 9/11, an event for which our president admitted Iraq was not responsible, yet one for which Iraqis have paid with blood.
Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Bush will blitz America over the next week or two, attempting to convince everyone that a vial of B-strain botulinum bacteria hidden in a referigerator since 1993 constitutes an active weapons program. They will neglect to mention that to convert this bacteria to weapons grade material requires sophisticated equipment that Iraq didn't have, and there is no indication Iraq had taken a first step on that path. They will play up newly discovered hidden laboratories "suitable for continuing CBW research." Indeed, much of Kay's conclusions center around so-called dual use facilities. These are facilities with a legitimate purpose but for which one can imagine a nefarious purpose. In other words, owning ordinary duct tape proves homicidal intent because everyone knows taping it over someone's nose and mouth causes suffocation. The Bush team is unwilling to consider that former Baathist scientists might lie or exaggerate to curry favor with the coalition and avoid arrest.
The government has not allowed the Iraq Survey Group (the team looking for the weapons in Iraq) to read Kay's classified report nor has it provided copies to the UN. Yet the CIA was given the report and allowed to make alterations:
More evidence of such programmes was included in a 200-page classified version of the 13-page report made public, but experts in the ISG, including former UN inspectors, have so far not been allowed to read the classified version, according to one of their former colleagues.
The refusal to allow ISG experts to read a report on their own work adds weight to suspicions that the report has been manipulated. "They're under huge pressure to come up with whatever," the ex-colleague said.
Mr Kay has said privately the report's publication was held up for about two weeks while more work was done on it at CIA headquarters.
In other words, no independent source has examined the basis for Kay's conclusions. Considering the Bush administration's previous determinations regarding aluminum tubes and mobile weapons labs, both of which Kay and coalition intelligence agencies have since discredited, how does one trust anything released from Kay's report or the conclusions the Bush team offers about it? The Bush administration has shown repeatedly a willingness to sacrifice truth for political gain.
As part of this new public relations offensive, Cheney yesterday insisted that critics of the Iraq war would have done nothing to protect the US from the dastardly Hussein. Prosecuting the Iraq war has diverted valuable resources and intelligence from pursuing Al Qaeda, the group we know was behind 9/11 and presents a much bigger threat to US interests than Iraq ever was, so one wonders why Cheney would fault anyone for suggesting we take care of bin Laden before Hussein.
Almost everyone on the UN security council agreed Hussein was violating the resolutions and that it was imperative to continuing pressuring him to cooperate with inspectors, including threatening force. Had Hussein eventually been stamped as in compliance, the UN would have continued to monitor Iraq for years. It would not have been unreasonable to give the inspectors the additional time that Kay now requests. In the months that he has had unfettered access to all of Iraq, Kay has proven what many previously suspected, including some in the intelligence field: Iraq did not present an imminent threat or even one that had to be dealt with before the expiration of the six- to nine- month extension Hans Blix requested.
The Bush administration complains that the media is not painting a Kinkade portrait of Iraq; they pretend that reconstruction mitigates the daily reports of violence and death that emerge from Baghadad. They want the media to highlight the many schools opened without higlighting the sad fact that in many towns, women and girls can no longer attend because of the danger from kidnappers and rapists:
...Fears of a similar fate have driven Baghdad's female population indoors. When schools reopened on October 4, classrooms were half empty, with girls kept home by parents forced to choose between education and safety.
They want the media to report on the thousands of Iraqi police officers turned out without pointing out that these officers have no guns to enforce the laws and that corruption is widespread among them.
The Bush team believes the media should emphasize the successful rebuilding projects, without mentioning allegations of corruption among the American companies there or talking about the high price tag of no-bid contracts awarded to Cheney's former company. Bush has asked for $20 billion to rebuild Iraq, yet Paul Bremer says estimates are that Iraq will require $100 billion to rebuild the infrastructure, not including the costs of maintaining a military presence.
The media has presented many positive stories coming out of Iraq, such as the great progress that has been made in Mosul. But for every plus, there are two minuses, and it's hard to point out that more houses in Baghdad have power without pointing out that fewer Iraqis now have homes.
Tribal tensions have increased in small villages outside Baghdad, where the US maintains little to no presence. The Shias, once grateful, are growing angry and impatient. Only an irresponsible media would fail to report a 10,000-person street march in which the Shia participants chant "No no no to America!"
A recent report on Iraq's economy shows that it has plummeted since the occupation, leaving more than 50 percent of Iraqis unemployed. Even doubling oil production will not be enough to pay for reconstructing Iraq and restoring its economy.
Despite White House claims that everything is going very well, the oversight of Iraq reconstruction efforts has been reshuffled again, delegating a more prominent role to the White House. Bush claims this new public relations offensive is an effort to "get the truth out" about Iraq, and yet the White House refused to grant interviews to PBS' Frontline for a hardhitting documentary on the Iraq war. Neither Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld or Cheney would avail themselves for interviews and the White House canceled a scheduled interview between PBS and Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz's Deputy, with only two hours' notice.
This is the third or fourth such publicity tour the White House has embarked on. For everyone, administration officials are only willing to talk to handpicked audiences of the party faithful who guarantee applause and ovations and softball questions. Media outlets that ask challenging questions find their access to the White House increasingly restricted while those who promote the Bush agenda, like FOX, are granted exclusive interviews with the president.
These public relations tours have nothing to do with explaining policy to the people and everything to do with Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, all on the taxpayer's dime. As long as the bodybags are kept off the news, Bush & Co. can say with straight faces that everything is going great in Iraq. How many loved ones of those dead Iraqis and dead US soldiers agree?
11:25:12 PM 
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