The British memo
Over at Salon, there’s an excellent article [Salon Daypass required] by Juan Cole about the British memo that proves Bush planned to invade Iraq all along.
Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600 U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by President George W. Bush and Di Rita’s more immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic and military no man’s land beset by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and political gridlock.
And we now know, thanks to a leaked British memo concerning the head of British intelligence, that the Bush administration — contrary to its explicit denials — had already made up its mind to attack Iraq and “fixed” those bogus allegations to support its decision. In short, Bush and his top officials lied about Iraq.
Take the time to sit through the brief ad at Salon and read the whole thing. The mainstream American media doesn’t apparently doesn’t consider this to be front page news, so it looks like they’re determined to give our Great Leader the same pass they gave him in the run-up to the war. Of course, if I had been manipulated the way the U.S. press was, maybe I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the latest proof that I was wrong either.