Truth - Al Franken [18]
The outlook could hardly have been bleaker. In Cincinnati, Bush laid out the cold, hard facts. “We learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.”
But poisons and deadly gases were child’s play compared to the threat the President would unveil next:
The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahideen”—his nuclear holy warriors. . . . 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. . . . Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists. . . .
We’ve experienced the horror of September the eleventh. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact, they would be eager, to use biological or chemical, or a nuclear weapon. . . . Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. 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.
Dear God.
Nuclear holy warriors! And a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud!
Thank goodness they didn’t have a softball of uranium yet! It made you think about what it would be like to die in a nuclear conflagration. It primed you to think about the emotion that the thought of your own death aroused in you, and specifically, what you thought would happen to you as you physically died and once you were physically dead. How could Americans manage such terror?
Fortunately, the 2002 midterm elections were only a month away. Frightened Americans had an opportunity to manage their mortal fear by voting Republican and electing senators like Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Jim Talent of Missouri, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, John Sununu of New Hampshire, and my personal favorite, Norm Coleman of Minnesota.
Then the third shoe dropped. In Bush’s State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, he told the nation that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
“Significant quantities?” Sounded bigger than a softball. Maybe Saddam had sought as much as a football, or worse yet, a basketball of uranium. A nuclear “slam dunk” could be coming in a year, or sooner. And sooner it was. A scant two months later, Cheney dropped the bomb about the bomb they might drop. On the March 16 Meet the Press, he told NBC’s gullible Tim Russert, “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”2
It was time to attack Iraq or die at the hands of Saddam’s nuclear mujahideen. The United States and a brave coalition of equally determined allies chose the only rational option.
(Attack.)
Polls throughout 2003 found that huge swaths of Americans believed Iraq was involved in 9/11. In a March 7–9 poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, 45 percent of interviewees agreed with the statement that “Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.” This idea came from somewhere. As The Christian Science Monitor reported, “Right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein.”
Long after the war started, the right-wing media started bleating that the Bush administration had