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Rachel Maddow will broadcast a special this coming Monday evening that promises to hit close to home with the ‘worse’ president in US History. A president who along with a crew of unethical war mongers, lied our nation into a war. The Iraq War was a war of personal vendetta and one that cost 4,500 Us lives. The war took the lives of 100,000 (Estimated) Iraqis while yielding not on atom of WMD. We should also mention John McCain’s personal libido teasers known as the “Surge” did not stop the killing in Iraq. One thousand US troops lost their lives during the so-called “surge”.
The BBC and an Iraqi perspective on McCain’s surge…. (poll) Read color bar legend at bottom of chart first.
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EFFECT OF THE ‘SURGE’
“The United States has increased the number of its forces in Baghdad and surrounding provinces in the past six months. Please tell me if you think this increase of forces has made it better, worse, or had no effect?”
The results of the poll reflect a great degree of dissatisfaction with the US “surge”, with a vast majority of respondents considering the move to have made the situation in the country worse rather than better.
See more linked above (poll)
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Unfortunately, during the course of the 2007/2008 campaign candidate Obama made the grievous mistake of saying the surge was an overwhelming success. McCain on the other hand lives and breathes ‘surge” when he is actually chasing an oasis.
We will also remind the Iraq War was one leg of a triad of federal malfeasance that contributed to our economic toes dipping into early stages of an economic depression. The other two legs” The War in Afghanistan and cutting taxes that dis-proportionally benefited the nation’s wealthy. Of course, passing an unfunded Medicare Prescription Plan also contributed to a Bush Legacy of fiscal insanity.
The following is a ‘deck’ from the Rachel Maddow Blog. We offer “kudos” to Michael Isikoff who has once again led in investigative journalism that matters.
We are posting this piece as an unabashed advertisement for the Monday evening special.
Maddow
How the Bush administration sold the Iraq war
File Photo: (VIDEO CAPTURE) In this image from video, U.S. President George W. Bush announces that the U.S. military struck at “targets of opportunity” in Iraq March 19, 2003 in Washington, DC. Air defense sirens and anti-aircraft fire was reported briefly in Baghdad. (Photo by Getty Images, File) 10:59 AM on 02/16/2013
ANALYSIS: As the Obama White House vigorously defends its policy of using drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists—including in some cases American citizens—it invokes the findings of secret intelligence showing that the targets pose an “imminent” threat to the U.S.
But there’s a powerful reason to be perennially skeptical of such claims–and perhaps never more so than now, as the country approaches a sobering historic moment: the tenth anniversary of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
The war that began March 19, 2003, was justified to the country by alarming claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida terrorists—almost all of which turned out to be false. Some of the most senior officials in the U.S. government, including President Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asserted these claims in public with absolute confidence, even while privately, ranking U.S. military officers and intelligence professionals were voicing their doubts. Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War, a documentary special hosted by Rachel Maddow that will air Monday night on MSNBC at 9 p.m. (and based on a book I co-authored with David Corn), provides new evidence that the dissent within the administration and military was even more profound and widespread than anybody has known until now.
“It was a shock, it was a total shock–I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this,” Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, told me in an interview for the documentary. Zinni, who had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iraq, was on a stage in Nashville, Tennessee, receiving an award from the Veteran of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, when he heard the vice president launch the opening salvo in the Bush administration’s campaign to generate public support for an invasion. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.” Zinni, sitting right next to Cheney’s lectern, says he “literally bolted” when he heard the vice president’s comments. “In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction], through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.” He recounts going to one of those CIA briefings and being struck by how thin the agency’s actual knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs was. “What I was hearing [from Bush administration officials] and what I knew did not jive,” Zinni says.
And we hear constant railing and B/S about how President Obama is ruining the nation, and we also hear undercurrent drivel about ‘impeachment”. Yes, we know it is simple conservative ‘whiny” stuff, but some do speak the word.
Since, McCain has admitted personal problems with Chick Hagel based on Hagel’s factual remarks about Bush, we again wonder, “Why doesn’t McCain retire to one of this homes?” Bush is by far the worse president in US History and we feel he ranks below Herbert Hoover at the bottom of the 44 presidents.
The Pardu's Scroll 