Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [19]
George W. Bush has turned the White House into the Home of the Whopper, telling one lie after another, all in pursuit of getting his dirty little war. It worked.
I like Whoppers. Flame-broiled, juicy, chock-full of onions and lettuce and loads of secret ingredients. They’re big, too; bigger than a Big Mac. You don’t even need to say “biggie size it, please” because it’s already so damn BIG. But I know Whoppers are bad for me, so I’ve given them up.
George W. Bush likes whoppers, too. His are HUGE. Texas-sized. They’re cooked up by a whole crew of people, and then he delivers them. And the American people gobble them up. One whopper after another. Big, juicy ones. And they go down nice and easy! The more the people eat, the more they want, and the more they think like Mr. Bush. They begin to believe everything he says because his whoppers are just so irresistibly good.
Bush’s whoppers are available in all shapes and sizes and configurations. Allow me to present to you the tasty menu the Whopper-in-Chief served up special just for you. I’ll call them “The Iraq War Combo Meals”:
#1 The Original Whopper: “Iraq has nuclear weapons!”
There is no greater way to scare a population than to say there is a madman on the loose and he has (or is building) nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons he intends to use on you.
George W. Bush laid the groundwork for scaring us silly early on. In his speech to the United Nations in September 2002, Bush said with a straight face that “Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a nuclear weapons [sic] is when, God forbid, he uses one.”
Soon after, on October 7, Bush told a crowd in Cincinnati, “If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. . . . Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
How to sway the American public from its initial reluctance to go to war with Iraq? Just say “mushroom cloud” and—BOOM!—watch those poll numbers turn around!
In addition to uranium from Africa, Bush said the Iraqis had “attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.”
Frightening stuff. Imagine how much more frightening if it was actually true. Joseph Wilson, a senior American diplomat with more than 20 years of experience, including positions in Africa and Iraq, was sent to Niger in 2002 on a CIA-directed mission to investigate the British claims that Iraq had tried to buy “yellowcake uranium” from Niger. He concluded that the allegations were false. Later, Wilson said:
Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the threat. . . . [The CIA] asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story. . . . In early March, I arrived [back] in Washington and submitted a detailed briefing to the CIA. . . . There should be at least four documents in the United States government archives confirming my mission.
(In July 2003, Wilson also had this to say: “It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?”)
The White House ignored Wilson’s report and instead kept the hoax alive. When the administration persisted with the fabricated story, one official, according to The New York Times, said, “People winced and thought, why are you repeating this trash?”
The documents from Niger were so badly faked that the Niger foreign minister who “signed” one of them was no longer in the government—in fact, he had been, unbeknownst to the British or American