- It is a sad business when you can no longer trust your
own government to tell you the truth. That's the great harm to America
that President Bush's propaganda campaign against Iraq has caused.
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- Trust is a fragile but precious thing. One lie can destroy
it, for once a person lies, you can never be certain in the future if he
or she is telling the truth or lying some more.
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- If only President Bush had been honest with us in regard
to Iraq, then I would be supporting him. All he had to do was tell the
truth: There is no evidence that links Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attack;
there is no hard evidence that he has any weapons of mass destruction,
but we suspect that he does; given his past history, we believe it is imperative
to get United Nations arms inspectors back into Iraq to determine the truth,
for I fear, if he does have weapons of mass destruction, he might one day
decide to supply them to terrorists.
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- Instead, the Bush administration has asserted as fact
that Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction, does have links to al-Qaida
and is an imminent threat to the security of the United States. When Iraq
offers to allow the world to come see for itself, Mr. Bush says that's
just a trick. When Iraq offers to allow the U.N. inspectors back in, Mr.
Bush argues against them going. He is determined to get the U.N. Security
Council to pass a resolution that no leader of any sovereign nation could
accept.
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- That's the same trick the Clinton administration pulled
on Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was willing to admit U.N. or even NATO observers
into Kosovo, but the United States insisted that as part of the deal, NATO
troops would have unrestricted access to all of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia
turned it down, as the United States knew it would, and the bombing campaign
started immediately.
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- That's what Bush wants. He wants a resolution Saddam
Hussein cannot accept so Bush will have the excuse to go to war. His objective
is not disarmament, but regime change and American occupation of Iraq.
American and British financial interests have never forgiven Iraq for kicking
them out in the late 1970s when it nationalized the Iraqi oil reserves.
Two of the clauses he knows Saddam will never accept are for any permanent
member of the Security Council to add its own representatives to the inspection
team and another clause that states armed forces should accompany the inspectors.
Mr. Bush has never mentioned to the American people that the United States
corrupted the last U.N. arms-inspection process by using it as a cover
for spies. That is a fact.
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- Hopefully, the French will hang tough, and Mr. Bush won't
get his war-triggering resolution. Then he will be forced to choose between
naked aggression without a U.N. fig leaf or allowing inspectors to go back
and do their job. I expect he will choose naked aggression. He will call
whatever gaggle of small and weak countries that give their passive assent
his "global coalition."
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- I thought of George Orwell when George Bush, in a belligerent
speech before he signed the congressional war resolution, said it was being
done "for the cause of peace." That's newspeak - war is peace.
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- Trust in George Bush is gone. What he is doing is anti-America
in the sense that it violates all the traditions that made this country
great. We are like Rome now, with thousands of soldiers stationed in more
than 60 countries and our emperor proclaiming the right to remove any sovereign
government he doesn't like (provided, of course, it is small and defenseless).
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- Far from serving the cause of peace, Mr. Bush is involving
our country in a perpetual war against the rest of the world, a war we
will eventually lose. He is not protecting the American people; he is endangering
all of us.
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- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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- http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20021023/index.php
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