Truth - Al Franken [17]
Here’s the next paragraph of that article:
“While we must assume that such a threat exists generally, we have no specific information now about any al-Qaida threats to our food or drug supply,” said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department.
Who do you suppose had “briefed” Lester M. Crawford about al Qaeda plans to “attack” imported drugs? Apparently not the same the person who had briefed Brian Roehrkasse. At any rate, Mr. Crawford explained to the AP that the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about drug reimportation.
My briefings indicate that the administration opposed drug reimportation because of an even more serious concern than the nonexistent threat of al Qaeda tampering with Canadian Lipitor: It would cut into the profits of their contributors in the pharmaceutical industry. Worse yet, it would make these drugs available at a lower price to Medicare recipients who desperately needed them, and as was no secret, Bush—like all Republican politicians—hated the old. Almost as much as he hated the young.
But the little black dress was at its most powerful when it was used to seduce America into invading the defanged, hapless Middle Eastern dictatorship known as Iraq.
Why would we go to the trouble of invading that country? Didn’t we remember that George H. W. Bush had warned us in 1999 that taking Baghdad after the first Gulf War “would have been disastrous”? Or that Dick Cheney had said in 1991 that such an invasion would get us “bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq?”1
Perhaps Iraq had somehow gotten far more dangerous during the intervening years. But that couldn’t be it. After all, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had both recently explained that Iraq posed no threat at all. As I’m sure you’ll remember, Colin Powell had addressed this very issue in a Q&A session with reporters at the Ittihadiya Palace in Cairo, after meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amre Moussa on February 24, 2001. His response to a question about the sanctions on Iraq rings as true today as it did then:
The sanctions exist—not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. . . . And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.
Five months later, Bush’s national security adviser chimed in with a similarly clear-eyed analysis. Here’s what Condi Rice told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the twenty-ninth of July:
In terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let’s remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.
But on September 11, 2001, the world changed. Overnight, Iraq developed a massive stockpile of, as Bush would describe them, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.” It was an accomplishment that put the Manhattan Project to shame.
It got worse. Saddam’s fascistic, rigidly secular government had suddenly developed a relationship with the fanatically religious terrorist group al Qaeda. As President Bush explained to the nation in a speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center on October 7, 2002, Iraq and al Qaeda now “had high-level contacts that go back a decade.” In fact, he said in a separate speech, “you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” The world faced a new and terrifying threat. The threat that, as the President warned that October evening, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group or to individual terrorists.”
Such a threat would have seemed implausible on 9/10. But if 9/11 had taught us anything, we learned from Bush and Cheney, it was that Iraq could