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Going gets tougher for Bush

M ABDUL HAFIZ
WITH a hugely deficit budget the US' traditional world view since jettisoned, and multilaterism -- once fostered by his country -- itself trampled by him, President Bush couldn't but opt to run as a 'war president' for his reelection bid. The preemption war being his forte he took refuge in national security which he claimed to have safe-
guarded by making the Us 'safer' than before. He ostensibly wanted to be likened to his great predecessors -- Roosevelt and Truman -- and incarnated himself as a crusader, redeemer and evangelist. By so doing he wanted to pursuade his people to back him in the manner they did when he launched his war on terror soon after nine/eleven. But a cascade of embarrassing revelations and accusations made recently is inexorably demolishing those slickly packaged made-for-TV images of Bush as scourge of Islamic terrorists the world over.
The lies, half lies and deceits the Bush-Blair duo resorted to had since been contested by different quarters. Those contestations became all the more convincing when, for instance, former Us President Jimmy Carter accused the incumbent President and Britain's Prime Minister Blair of waging a 'war of lies' against Iraq. They could not prove either the existence of Iraq's WMD or its connection with any terrorist outfit. As a result many among those who supported the war have now been driven to change their mind. A prominent case in point is former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollock who in 2002 wrote a book titled 'Threatening storm: The case for invading Iraq'. He conceded after the fall of Baghdad that the case for war with Iraq was 'considerably weaker than I believed'. Poland's President said he was deceived by Bush in sending troops to Iraq. spain's newly elected Prime Minister Zapatero argued that one "cannot organise war with lies." He strongly holds that military intervention in Iraq was a "political mistake." Zapatero's views were amply vindicated when his socialist Party won a landslide recently.
However, the bombshell exploded when respected former counter terrorism chief both under Clinton and Bush went public with most serious accusation yet made against Bush White House. He offered a telling account of White House's almost surreal fixation on Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In his testimony before the commission investigating the september 11 attacks on the Us he asserted that the Bush administration did not promote Us National security. It rather damaged the National security by not doing enough to prevent 9/11 attacks.
Indeed from the day one of his presidency Bush White House set its sight on Iraq. In fact, Mr Bush was so obsessed with going after Saddam Hussein that he openly charged his counter-terrorism adviser to find a link between September 11 and Iraq barely a day after the attacks took place. Both in a recently published book and in a series of high profile television appearances Richard Clarke who witnessed as a principal actor in White House the apathy of CIA, Pentagon and FBI to terrorist threat of al-Qaeda, launched a blistering critique of President Bush's first eight months in office. Mr Bush, he charged, failed to take steps that might have stopped September 11, and then wasted American resources and lives on an unrelated and unnecessary war in Iraq.
As regard other important players of Bush team, Richard Clarke, himself a Republican, accused Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of Iraq war, of belittling al-Qaeda threat -- the unspoken assumption being Wolfowitz's eagerness to destroy a
direct enemy of Israel than go after al-Qaeda. According to Clarke, Defence secretary Rumsfeld's principal pre-occupation before 9/11 had been his passion for the Us' Anti-Missile Defence. The Commission's report recorded that Rumsfeld "did not recall any particular counter-terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11" whereas CIA claimed to have warned both Bush and Rumsfeld almost on daily basis of the impending terrorist attacks.
Clarke's revealations apparently offended Bush White House from where a viperous character assassin Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National security adviser has led the White House's vicious attacks on Clarke. But too many people outside the White House sphere of influence are well informed, be they commandos on the ground or career civil servants at the state department and CIA. some have come forward risking the ire of Bushies. Many more are considering it, weighing their conscience alongside their sense of selfpreservation. several who are talking now do so on the condition of anonymity. But as the election campaign heats up, some will rethink and go on the record. For it is becoming clear that their silence might ensure that the Bush White House gets away with the central lie of its tenure -- the blanket denial that it abandoned the war on terror to pursue an unrelated pre-selected Iraq agenda to please its zionist allies.
Pitted against a decorated war hero Bush's stance of being 'war president' is almost rendered unworkable only after the opening salvoes of accusations amidst total mess-up in Iraq. Even on half-forgotten Afghan front Bush faces embarrassment with the war's prime targets there -- bin Laden and Mullah Umar -still remaining elusive. The louder the Bush administration proclaims that it is the only qualified protector of National security the more hollow it rings in the ear of ones who know the truth. sooner or later -- and certainly before November -- the truth will be out much more graphically to the embarrassment of Bush campaigners.
Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.