In a speech typical of the kindergarten rhetoric, Jacobin black/white good vs. evil simplistic worldview and bad logic we’ve come to expect from Bush and his court jesters and sycophants, King George served up the same lame justifications for his murderous romp through Iraq, even while making an evasive and weak admission that his casus belli was um….still missing….
“Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq,” Bush said.
Disingenuous to the end, every statement has to be hedged about with sneaky qualifications and larded with euphemisms. “We have not found stockpiles….,” he says, even though they’ve found absolutely squat. “Go into” Iraq is such a nice way to say kill around 13,000 Iraqis and destroy the place in pursuit of a delusion.And, why was he right to “go into” Iraq?
“We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” Bush said.
Had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder. WMMs? What’s a weapon of mass murder? A gun? A tank? Jim Jones’ grape Kool-Aid? Notice he admits that there were no so-called WMD and then morphs the argument into WMM. The entire sentence is a lie because anything can be used for mass murder. In Darfur, right now, militiamen armed with swords and rifles and mounted on camels and horses are doing a fine job of mass murdering entire villages.
“…could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them.” Could have? Is there any state in existence that couldn’t have? Is there any evidence at all of Iraqi connections to terrorist attacks on the US? No, there is not, but you won’t learn that in a Dubyanocchio speech.
Saddam refused to open his country to inspections, Bush said.
Oh, right, no one knows about Hans Blix or anything. Does Bush really think everyone has Alzheimer’s or what? The US had to tell the inspectors to leave Iraq before they got bombed along with all the Iraqis doomed to die in the US invasion.
“So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.”
A classic logical fallacy called the False Dilemma. How about instead, we say: “….either take the word of a madman or defend America OR admit that diplomacy and ongoing inspections were better, less costly and bloody options that had worked well for the past ten years and give up the exciting, glorious thrill of being a War President and the, as it turns out, delusionary notion of remaking the Middle East.” Yeah. That’s better.