George Bush’s statement before the Israeli Knesset this month confirms my long held view that what the late Washington insider Clark Clifford said of Ronald Reagan – our president’s hero – is also true of George II: “He is an amiable dunce!” I have repeatedly argued that George Bush is a hapless ignoramus, more dumb than evil. In keeping with that view I pointed out that he was convinced to invade Iraq by much smarter men - Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglass Feith, Scooter Libby, et al – who are truly evil. My evidence for this view is voluminous and will be published in a 110 page essay: The Emperor’s New Clothes: Notes on my Debate with Christopher Hitchens, a Silver Tongued Sophist. This treatise, which will be published in an anthology titled Commentaries on Our Times: Prescient Grafiti from Cyberspace, addresses all of the critical questions regarding the Bush Administration’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq under the guise of retaliating for the 9/11 attack by Muslim Jihadists.

The essay looks very closely at the fact that Iraq was a country that not only had nothing to do with 9/11, and that its president, Sadam Hussein was in fact an enemy of Al Quida and the fundamentalist Islamic doctrine in general. Which, viewed from the perspective of realpolitic, suggests that Sadam was a natural ally in the fight against “Osama been forgotten!” Any objective examination of the facts regarding the decision to invade Iraq will reveal that it was based on the lies and deception conjured up by the cabal of neo-con witch doctors brought into white house power circles by “Dirty Dick” Cheney, who was in charge of the transition team when George II took office.

Dirty Dick, is a classic fascist who believes in the corporate warfare state born of a “military industrial complex” committed to permanent war that General Dwight Eisenhower, the heroic Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II, warned about in his farewell address to the nation upon retiring from the Oval Office after distinguished careers serving the nation as military man and President.

The evidence is near overwhelming and certainly irrefutable, that Dirty Dick and his band of murderous neo-con spinmeisters had long lobbied plans for an invasion of Iraq through a stream of position papers prepared at The Project for a New American Century. This privately funded think tank, like The Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute, is part of a phalanx of policy institutes which finance the work of intellectual hit men who seek to turn back the progressive policies and nullify the gains made during the turbulent struggles of the 1960’s, and even undo the New Deal reforms born of the disaster of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Most of the neo-con gang had been hanging around Washington since the reign of George I, whose savvy understanding of international relations acquired from his stint as CIA chief led him to dismiss them as “The Crazies” when they attempted to persuade him to expand the mission of “Operation Desert Storm” to include the overthrow of Sadam Hussein! And General Colin Powell, who was then the Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs of Staff, reminded George I of the “Pottery Barn rule: If you break it you own it!” This translates in political terms to mean: “If American forces overthrow the Iraqi government we will have to take over the governance of that country until a new order can be imposed. In the beginning George II turned a deaf ear to their pleas for an interventionist policy in the Middle-East - albeit more out of apathy and ignorance than strong intellectual conviction.

Looking back upon those halcyon moments before the catastrophe in Iraq, it seems like a distant hallucination when we reflect upon the fact that at the beginning of his Administration George II announced: “This Administration will not be engaging in nation building.” He also declared: “The Middle East will occupy no special place in our foreign policy.” Yet this Bush Administration has undertaken the most massive nation building project in our nation’s history in the Middle East! What happened?

Well, 9/11 happened and our clueless President, embarrassingly ignorant of the ways of the world, panicked and stopped listening to the seasoned pros in the State Department and CIA. That’s when the Neo-Con gang seized the initiative, and in the heat of the moment clouded by the fog of war they captured the President’s attention. Since his head is a Tabla Rasa, on which anything can be written depending on who has access to it at the time, George II became the captive of the Gang of Four: Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, and Dirty Dick! One need only read the position paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century, issued by the Project for a New American Century before Bush took office in (Give date) This treatise, which is a blueprint for a Pax Americana to rival the notorious “Roman Peace” imposed upon subject peoples when Rome ruled the world, contains the plan that was later followed in the invasion of Iraq.

Only when this document is read and analyzed can the invasion of Iraq make any sense. All of the real experts on the middle East and the global war on terror opposed the invasion from Richard Clarke, the reigning Terrorism Czar in the Bush Administration, to the White House CIA expert on the Middle East, to retired intelligence experts like former 27 year CIA veteran mid-east analyst, Ray McGovern. And most damning of all is the analysis of Professor Jeffery Record, a colonel in the US Army and a Professor at the elite Army War College, where all field grade officers are assigned for training in the latest theories in Military Science before receiving major combat commands.

In a 62 page monograph published by the AWC, Prof. Jeffrey writes

“Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it.”

Prof Jeffery’s analysis reinforced the skepticism of a group of ex-CIA Middle East experts expressed in the views of Ray McGovern who had advised several presidents, including George I and Their beloved Ronald Reagan. In a statement to Associated Press reporter John Lumpkin, published on March 15, 2003, McGovern said that the evidence presented by the Bush Administration justifying the invasion of Iraq “lacks credibility.” He went on to observe: “The evidence is cooked to a recipe, and that recipe is high policy. That's why a lot of my colleagues are holding their noses these days." In other words the Bushmen were lying through their dirty teeth!

However the most devastating inside look at how the decision to invade Iraq was made is provided by Paul R. Pillar, the resident CIA mid-east analyst in the White House from 2000-2005. Presently a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University, Pillar published a detailed account in Foreign Affairs magazine explaining how the Bush Administration either ignored or misused intelligence reports in arriving at the decision to invade Iraq. Which is to say he was an eyewitness to the manipulation of intelligence that the retired CIA agents around Ray McGovern predicted was going on to whip up war hysteria in support of the invasion.

Calling the relationship between the Bushmen and the intelligence community “dysfunctional” professor Pillar tells us: “The most serious problem with U.S. intelligence today is that its relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments.”

In other words the neo-cons who had bogarted Bush’s ear in the confusion following the 9/11 attack purposefully ignored the advice intelligence professionals and manipulated their intelligence product – for which the American taxpayer paid in excess of thirty billion dollars – to suit their predetermined objective of toppling Sadam Hussein. All the available evidence proves that this was a war of choice that never should have happened, but a clueless George Bush was unable to stop them with opposing arguments. And based upon his comments in Israel he remains clueless! Aside from the ridiculous comparison of Barack and Ahmadinijad with Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, whose attempt to reason with Hitler is blamed for encouraging his aggression, which is blamed for the disaster of World War II, Bush was obviously unaware that his CIA Director, Bill Gates, was recommending that talks be held with the leadership of Iran, which was reported in the Washington Post! Perhaps this guy really is the King of fools, and has cost the nation dearly in blood and treasure.

So why should anybody care what this lame duck ignoramus has to say when we can listen to a bright young man who understood that the Iraq invasion was a tragic mistake from the git go? Perhaps nobody told George II – since he is surrounded by obsequious lick spittles – that it is far better to be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt!

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Playthell Benjamin, is a Journalist, novelist and the Associate Editor of The Black World Today. A former columnist at The New York Daily News, his articles and commentaries appear in major newspapers and magazines in the USA and Europe. Click here to contact Mr. Benjamin.

 

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