by James Glaser
June 17, 2004

The "Bush Lied" line came from a bumper sticker I saw today in Northome. It was fitting to see it on the day that the 9/11 Commission reported that there was no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein helped Al-Qaida. They did say in 1994, bin Laden was asking Iraq for some help, but Saddam blew him off.

Add that one to the list of lies George Bush used to get us into a war with Iraq.

In yesterdays column I said that George Bush was a Mad Man and a couple readers got upset with that. Well, I think it is true, I think I called him a religious fanatic too.

George Bush used God and false claims to get us into a war with a totally pitiful country, that didn't have a chance against our military might. Within days we destroyed the Iraqi Army, an army that was reported to be made up of mostly young conscripts. Iraq had no Navy or Air force and their military equipment was outdated and in poor repair.

Just to make sure, we not only destroyed military targets, but also almost the entire civilian infrastructure. That included electrical generating plants, sewage treatment plants, and drinking water plants. All of that destruction is a war crime, at least it would be if any other country did the same.

The Bush White House and the American media built up the Iraqi military as some sort of mini super power and they fell like a house of cards. We went in there to shock and awe them and we did.

According to the Guardian Newspaper, Under US Army Rules of Engagement, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld was required to authorize any air strike that was likely to result in the deaths of 30 or more civilians.

Fifty times such attacks were proposed and approved. A US Air force report in April last year confirmed that there were 50 such missions. Some of these attacks on civilians used 2,000 pound "bunker buster" bombs. What they were trying to hit, was high profile government and military officials. They never hit one official, but they did kill a lot of civilians.

Rumsfeld approved 50 of these missions and with the possibility of killing at least 30 civilians in each, he approver the killing of at least 1500 civilians. We don't know how many civilians we killed as we refused to do civilian body counts.

Last month a poll was requested by the Coalition Provisional Authority. That is us and the other countries that have troops occupying Iraq. This was another secret, kind of like the secret memo that was sent to the troops telling them they could torture detained civilians in Iraq.

This poll that was not released to the American public, found that more than half of Iraqis believe both that they'd be safer without US forces and that all Americans behave like the Military Prison Guards pictured in the Abu Ghraib abuse Photos.

Think about how many times the President or one of our politicians has told us that most of the Iraqi people are happy we are there. I knew that was bullshit the first time I heard it. All you have to ask yourself is how happy would you be, if armed foreign troops were over here? Troops that can't even speak our language! Troops that come in the middle of the night and bust down people's doors and take away the men and young boys, to never be heard of again. So much for winning their hearts and minds.

I think that bumper sticker is right on. Bush Lied and Our Soldiers Died. Bush Lied and Women and Children and Infants, and the Sick and the Infirmed Died Too.

You can try and tell me that it wasn't George's fault. You can say he got bad intelligence from the FBI and the CIA, but I'm not buying that. Thousands and thousands of innocent people are dead, at last report 837 Americans are dead and over 5,000 wounded.

Finally now, newspapers are finding out the facts about what was said to get us into this war and a lot of it was lies. If George wanted to, he could have found that out too, before we attacked. Remember, George Bush is the President of the United States and if he pushed his people, he could have been damn sure everything his administration was saying was right on.

In fact he did just that, George sent a former Ambassador to Africa to find out if the uranium deal was true and it was reported back to him that it was a false claim. What did George Bush do? He looked us all in the eye and lied by saying that it was true, even when he knew it was false.

I said George Bush was a "mad man" and a "religious fanatic." Hey, anyone that will use God and lies to start a war against a country that has no chance of attacking his country, a real pitiful country and in that war tens of thousands get killed and many thousands of those killed are innocent civilians, then yes, I can say that man is a mad, religious fanatic.

The real shame here is that George Bush is doing all of this in our name. The rest of the world is not blinded by our media and they know about how the Iraqi people feel. They know about how we torture civilians. They know about our dropping Bunker Buster Bombs on civilian targets. They know about the "Iraqi Body Count."

Just think about how many American and Iraqi lives George Bush has destroyed so that he could have his war. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, no chance of Iraq sending mushroom shaped clouds over American cities, and no cooperation between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Bush Lied and Our Soldiers Died! .......God is that sad or what?