Thursday, February 17, 2011

For Once, I Agree With Chris Matthews

He of the tingly leg, has taken a more martial tone in his latest piece, in a "call to arms" against the "unpatriotic Bush and Rumsfeld." Specifically, he wants us all to call our Senators and to harass them into holding a hearing on the reasons that Bush led us into the Iraq war. As he says:
We now know from the Secretary of Defense's own hand that there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq, no production facility to make them, no evidence of any purchases of such weapons, no attempt to buy such weapons. Nada.
And
I ask you to call your senator and cite the Rumsfeld book, cite the National Intelligence Estimates of late 2002, which he cites, and the report of the intelligence director for the joint chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. All this is in the book, all this evidence that there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq despite all the talk by President Bush and his people about "mushroom clouds.
Of course, all these facts were found out after the war. Now, seems to me that Saddam had an opportunity to clarify the issue, but he deliberately chose not to. In fact, he actively conspired to make it look like he had weapons of mass destruction. But, innocent until proven guilty, right? Why should Saddam have to prove he didn't have them? The answer is that the end of the First Gulf War was an armistice, not a peace treaty. One of the elements was that Saddam had to demonstrate that he had disarmed. He never did do that, and therefore, the Second Gulf War was legally a continuation of the First. Ergo, legal.
Chris continues his cute little rant and stomps his feet, but the reality is that such a hearing would finally dispel the nonsense that he is talking about. Bush never "lied" because you have to know for a fact that something else is true and state the other in order to be a lie. Bush knew as much as everyone else in the world about the presence or capability of WMDs.
No, this is just more partisan tripe, and it needs to be examined so that the people who allege that Bush to be a liar, are themselves shown to be liars. And the worst thing is, that they so wanted to destroy a president in the middle of a war.
God may forgive them, but I am not God.

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