Evidence shows clear path of premeditated war

There is a slow but perceptible drumbeat calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush on grounds he fixed the facts to justify invading Iraq, and deliberately timed the invasion to influence midterm elections.

These revelations come from leaked secret minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting where the head of British MI6, after visiting the Bush administration in Washington, reported back to Prime Minister Tony Blair that "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. ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

These minutes also make it clear the Bush team knew that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, and that they in fact regarded several other countries as far more serious WMD threats than Iraq.

We know from previous research conducted by the New York Times that the president and vice president portrayed the infamous captured aluminum tubes as hard evidence of an Iraqi WMD program even though their own advisers were vigorously saying the tubes were for rockets, not for nuclear production. The British memo confirms that Bush and Cheney were not misled by bad intelligence, but were looking for any fig-leaf they could find to give them cover for a decision they had already made to invade.

We still really do not know why they were so determined to invade. Heaven knows many of their own experts warned them it would turn into a quagmire, especially if they did not deploy sufficient troops. They chose to invade, under false pretences, and then hashed up the execution beyond our worst nightmares.

So why did they choose to invade? According to Paul O’Neill, Bush’s former treasury secretary, the decision to invade Iraq was made before Sept. 11, right at the beginning of Bush’s first term. The intelligence expert George Friedman offers an explanation in his book, "America’s Secret War." He feels Cheney and Bush decided it was important to make a bold threatening statement to all the Arab neighbors of Iraq, especially Saudi Arabia, to compel them to hunt down Al-Qaeda (which had attacked America’s interests well before Sept. 11). According to Friedman, the administration felt that Al-Qaeda needed to be denied any haven in the Arab world, and America needed to be a physically present and imminent threat to anyone that failed to stomp on the Al-Qaeda operatives in their midst.

Apparently the urgency they felt in 2002 was the fear Al-Qaeda was about to set off a nuclear device in some major U.S. city and bring America to its knees. They set off to hunt down the suspected nuclear device within the USA. They felt justified in using any and all means regardless of the niceties of legality because in their mind it was for the greater good.

Friedman points out that the U.S. could not be frank about its real motivation to invade - namely, to be a threatening presence in the Middle East - because it does not provide any legal basis for invasion under international law. However, their choice of the "WMD threat" propaganda campaign showed more political ineptitude than finesse. He feels that that the real reason is more justifiable than the bogus one. But, instead, they lied and dissembled to justify the invasion, losing international support in the process, and so have taken the nation into a war that will be very hard to win and that has already taken or damaged a very large number of lives.

To these high crimes and misdemeanors one must also add the administration’s callous and illegal treatment of prisoners of war. This has harmed America in its role as world leader and we have yet to feel all the repercussions of the deeply-flawed policy of "extraordinary rendition" and expedient torture, as blessed by now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his infamous White House memos.

Bush and Cheney must answer the allegations now posed to them formally by 89 Democratic members of Congress as to why the administration lied to the Congress and to the public, evidenced by the 2002 British meeting minutes. If the 2006 midterm elections hand the Democrats control of one branch of the Congress then they can proceed to introduce articles of impeachment.

Cheney and Rumsfeld cut their teeth in the Nixon White House, which was awash in secrecy and illegal behavior. The only thing they seem to have learned from that experience was to be better at being secretive and deceptive.

http://www2.townonline.com/winchester/opinion/view.bg?articleid=261783