by James Glaser
February 7, 2005

Trust—"A confident reliance on the integrity, honesty, or justice of another;" or "A confidence in the reliability of persons or things without careful investigation."

I don't think there is anyone in Washington that has the trust of the all the people of this country or even a large majority of them. Just as an example, today Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was telling a television journalist that Iraq had 135, 065 trained security personnel. He said, "We counted them."

I didn't trust that was true, either the exact number or that they were trained. Upon further questioning Secretary Rumsfeld admitted that some of these Iraqis had only very limited training, but he touted that some fought bravely in Fallujah. As I remember back on the battle for that city, it was the United States Marine Corps, who did the fighting and the dying in taking that city and at the most, there were 2,000 Iraqis involved in the operation. 2,000 trained forces are long way from 135,000. All week the Bush administration has been using this 135,000 number.

Things like this have been going on all through George Bush's time in office. Just this week President Bush was telling the nation that Social Security will be "flat bust" in 2042. According to the Christian Science Monitor, "Even the Social Security system's trustees say the program would still be able to pay 70 percent of promised benefits then."

Last Thursday President Bush told a group in Fargo about his idea for personal accounts. "I've heard all of the complaints... how this is going to ruin Social Security. Forget it, it's going to make it stronger."

President Bush's senior officials had to tell reporters that personal accounts do not cure the system's solvency woes.

It isn't just Bush and the Republicans, it is the Democrats too. Both sides play hard and fast with the truth, but usually in the end they are found out. The lies and distortions of the truth hurt our country, because now, even when a politician is telling the truth, many people will say, "ah bullshit!"

President Clinton lied about having sex with "that woman." And George Senior not only lied about reading his lips, but about dealings he had with South American Dictators. Reagan lied about lots of things, but selling arms to terrorists was bad and he came clean about that on national television.

I don't think Jimmy Carter lied and his honesty gave him only one term.

I really believe that most politicians lie and I don't think they have to. If George Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and he tried to kill my dad, he's killed tens of thousands of his own people and he will hurt us if he can and I want to take him out and free his people, I think not only the American people, but a lot of people around the globe would have bought it.

If George Bush would have played the "Freeing the Iraqi People" card, many Americans would have stood up and said that was a good thing. Now we have to look at how we torture the Iraqi people in the same prisons Saddam used. We now know that instead of freeing the people of Iraq, we are occupying their land and killing their people. Americans don't get to see the dead Iraqi children and their dead mothers on our televisions, but the rest of the world does... every night.

Trust works both ways, and Washington does not trust you and me, because they have made it illegal for us to even see pictures of the flag draped coffins of our dead troops coming home. We are not allowed to see all the pictures of how we torture Iraqi civilians and you know American television is not about to show wounded Americans or dead Iraqi kids. We can't be trusted with the truth of war, because then we might want to stop it... and who does Washington work for?

George Bush did not have the integrity needed to be that honest with us about Iraq, so he had to lie us into the war. There was no talk about freeing the Iraqi people or bringing elections and democracy to that country, so right now, the rest of the world does not trust at all what George says he is trying to do and neither should we. Freedom for Iraq and Democracy are fall back positions, to use when other reasons were found to be lies. Because the whole war was based on lies, I don't trust anything Washington says they are doing in Iraq.

I would like to believe my leaders in Washington, but they have to earn that trust by being honest with me and they aren't. Not only is that a shame, it has cost our country the respect we once had from the rest of the world and it will take us a generation at least to get that trust back and we haven't even started telling the truth yet, so who knows how long it will take.