The start of the Iraq war is back in the news again, and the guy who’s reviving the conversation is named Bush. No, not THAT Bush … the chunky one who used to run Florida (voted craziest state in the Union three years in a row – lookout, Texas!). Jeb Bush stumbled over a couple of questions about whether or not he would have done the same thing his imbecile brother did back in 2003. At first he seemed to suggest that he would have done the same thing, then later backtracked a bit, saying that, knowing what “we” know now, he would have done something different. A little later, he was invoking the name of our dead and injured troops to cover his ass, as his brother so often did

Okay, so first of all, “we” knew what we know now then. Brother Bush is just clinging to the mythology spun by his and his brother’s advisers. You remember the story – we had all this seemingly reliable intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, supplied by the CIA, that turned out to be unreliable. All their fault. Of course, at the time it was painfully obvious that the WMD story was bogus, as was the story about any link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Yellowcake uranium story? Debunked at the time. Aluminum tubes? Again, thoroughly refuted at the time. Al Qaeda in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2002? Crap, reported at the time. I could go on.

It’s actually worse than that. Based on what seemed obvious at the time (and what we almost certainly know to be true), the Bush administration was fishing for the best available rationale to invade Iraq, something they had decided upon long before then entered the White House. They scrounged around for scraps of evidence, pushing the British and the Germans for details, torturing detainees for desperate incriminating confessions, and so on. You don’t water-board people dozens and dozens of times unless you’re trying to get something specific out of them, true or not. In the end, they got what they needed – some bullshit that momentarily added to their case.

The result? Hundreds of thousands dead, including more than 4,500 Americans, and a disaster that keeps metastasizing into new and more virulent convulsions of violence. That’s the eternal flame Jeb is dancing around.

luv u,

jp