Deconstructing Tom Bohs

The Jackson Sun is a daily newspaper near Memphis,TN. The following is an editorial from Tom Bohs, the editorial page's editor, which through the miracle of the Internet I picked up. My responses are in italics.

“It is past time to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. It is illogical to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people on 9/11 by sacrificing the lives of 4,000 American troops in a war to overthrow a tin-pot dictator who had nothing to do with 9/11 or the people behind it.”

Actually the issue isn’t the number killed, the issue is that this was the end of a long series of attacks by radical Muslim terrorists both outside and inside the US. It was an act of war.

The American people were lied to by the Bush administration as it campaigned for the war. So says the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's long awaited report on how we got into this war.

The long delayed report concludes that the Bush administration knowingly exaggerated Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaeda, his involvement in terrorism and his possession of weapons of mass destruction. What the Bush administration did was not a mistake. It was a lie.

Okay , we get his point that he thinks it was a “lie.” After all, he only writes it every third word or so… okay… so it’s only three or four or seven.

The committee report was approved in a 10-5 vote with two Republicans joining the majority.

No. What it was…was a partisan political attack by the Democrats joined by two feckless Republicans In Name Only.

Must we always be reminding members of the Left and the MSM that the Demos who voted for the war saw the same intelligence reports that the Repubs did? And must we remind them continually that every major intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam had WMD’s??

None of this is news to anyone who has followed the war. It is confirmation. It should make you angry. And the response to the report on Thursday from the Bush administration should make you even angrier.

In response to the report, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino simply noted that the issue of inaccurate intelligence has already been acknowledged. "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. We certainly regret that and we've taken measures to fix it."

Perino and the rest of the Bush liars don't regret this nearly as much as the families of more than 4,000 dead American troops and the tens of thousands who have been injured.

And Perino and the administration are dead wrong about inaccurate intelligence. That is not what the report says. The report says, "The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (Sept. 11, 2001) attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein." The report further says, "Representing to the American people that the two (Hussein - al Qaeda) had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation into war on false pretenses."

They lied!

Hmmmm. Did the Clinton administration lie when their Justice Department issued an indictment on 11/9/08 against bin Ladin that, among other things said:
“Additionally, the indictment states that Al Qaeda reached an agreement
with Iraq not to work against the regime of Saddam Hussein and that
they would work cooperatively with Iraq, particularly in weapons development”

Indictment

Was Bill Clinton lying??

Was Patrick Fitzgerald, he of prosecuting Scooter Libby fame, lying to the 9/11 Commission when he said:

“We did understand from people, including al-Fadl -- and my recollection is that he would have described this most likely in public at the trial that we had, but I can't tell you that for sure; that was a few years ago -- that at a certain point they decided that they wouldn't work against each other and that we believed a fellow in al Qaeda named Mondu Saleem (ph), Abu Harzai (ph) the Iraqi, tried to reach a, sort of, understanding where they wouldn't work against each other. Sort of, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

…..And then we had information from al-Fadl, who we believe was truthful, learning from others that there were also was efforts to try to work with Iraq. That was the basis for what we put in that indictment.”

Link

Tell us Tom. Was Fitzpatrick lying? I mean you have to watch these people testifying to national commissions. No telling what they will say.

They knew the intelligence was wrong or non-existent. They knew there was no connection between Hussein and al Qaeda. They knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. Then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even said the Iraqi government was operating underground weapons of mass destruction facilities. There was no intelligence to support that, says the Senate report. He bold-faced lied!
Even if we allow the Bush administration the fantasy that the intelligence was wrong, rather than ignored and lied about, where does that leave us? It leaves us in a war we shouldn't have started.

Oh, really? Well, what did Scott Ritter think about the situation? You do remember Scott, don’t you? Not exactly a fan of Bush, eh?

“Iraq's borders are porous. Why couldn't Saddam have obtained the capacity to produce WMD since 1998 when the weapons inspectors left?

I am more aware than any UN official that Iraq has set up covert procurement funds to violate sanctions. This was true in 1997-1998, and I'm sure its true today. Of course Iraq can do this. “

Link

When you get into a fight you shouldn't have started, you get out. That's what we did in Vietnam. And the people of America and the people of Vietnam are better for it.

Ah yes, the old Vietnam nonsense. Oh well, since Tom brought it up, do you remember the 2,000,000 or so that were killed or died in the re-education camps?? The rape and murder of the Boat People?? And do you think our despicable actions in leaving had a bit to do with the killing fields in Cambodia? I certainly do.

I mean you can argue all you want, but when a super power starts a war then it must finish it properly. To do otherwise stains our honor and kills millions of innocent people.

The war we unleashed under false pretenses in Iraq is a civil war. Our American troops have no business fighting someone else's civil war. Not one more American soldier should die because the Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds can't get along. The Iraqis sit on the second largest oil reserves in the world. Let them figure out what to do about them. If their religious beliefs cause them to kill each other, I'm sorry. But not another American soldier's life should be sacrificed in their religious argument.

The war in Iraq is not about al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden - who is still at large - and it never was. Other countries now realize this and that's why they are withdrawing their troops from Iraq. We would not involve American soldiers in a civil war in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, why would we get in the middle of one between Shiites and Sunnis?

Bush's war has driven our country to penury. Our national debt has tripled. We are paying for the war, in effect, by borrowing money from China. The cost of oil has gone up 600 percent. Americans are riding bicycles to work, for crying out loud. Sick Americans can't afford health care, but billions are being spent on the war every month. And there is no end in sight for the civil/religious struggle in that war-torn country.

Bush lied. We paid, and are paying. It's time to bring an end to this American tragedy and get out of Iraq.

It was never a civil war, and you know that. It was an attempt by the remnants of Saddam’s Sunni forces to re-seize the country by terror and by al-Qaida to run the US off by any means because the terrorist forces cannot afford to have a stable secular democratic Iraq.

And I have just deconstructed his arguments. And precious weak ones they were.