he President was addressing the Cleveland City Club in another of his carefully screened appearances to regain support for the war in Iraq, when one of the people in the audience posed the simplest and most telling of questions, "How do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and to be sure that the information they are getting is now correct?" A tough, respectful question to answer, particularly as the elderly gentleman had cited what many believe, that the three main reasons for going to war were fallacious. The WMD (weapons of mass destruction) were non-existent. The supposed ties Saddam's Iraq had with the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorists. There was no connection, whatsoever, and the alleged purchase from Niger of nuclear material. It didn't happen.
The President's response included the following as to how we restore confidence, "That's a great question." He said, "Where did we go wrong on intelligence. The truth of the matter is that the whole world thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."
Mr.President, that's not accurate. Most of the world wanted to hear from the U.N. inspectors who where right there in Iraq. They found no evidence of WMD. A few days ago the AP reported several translations of audio tapes of top-level Iraqi meetings chaired by Hussein, released by the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, that showed that Iraq's WMD program was destroyed almost a decade earlier. The tapes were known to the President soon after the war began, but the Bush administration kept the information secret.
Columnist Robert Scheer made these points and more, far more powerfully, in a recent column for the Common Dreams News Center website, under the heading "Bush Bombs in Cleveland."
Just released is a study by the Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, Joseph Stiglitz and a colleague, Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who estimate that the "true costs" of the war exceed $1 trillion and possibly, eventually, more than $2 trillion. They make this claim assuming that all U.S. troops are home by 2010.
This was going to be a cheap and rapid war; an easy one.
When Laurence Lindsay the president's chief economic advisor estimated that it was likely to cost $100 billion to $200 billion they fired him because, at that time, the administration was talking about a $50 billion war.
"How do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and be sure that the information they are getting now is correct" (a Cleveland gentleman's question).
"How indeed", the president's answer.