by James Glaser
December 8, 2005

Seldom will George Bush bring up the name, Osama bin Laden. If you think back a couple of years ago you will remember George saying that we were going to get Osama "dead or alive" like in the old West. It was Osama this or Osama that. That was when George was in his Texas Cowboy stage. Now Osama is seldom mentioned, because we never did get him, in fact we pulled the troops out of Afghanistan who were looking for him so they could attack Iraq. Talking about Osama bin Laden makes George look bad, so George takes him out of the script.

Today, George will not talk about why we attacked Iraq either. Right now George is out on the stump trying to get the public back on his side about his war, but there is never a mention about mushroom shaped clouds, chemical weapons, or Saddam and 9/11. If these subjects come up, George tells us that the Democrats were fooled too. Then he talks about how the world is better off without Saddam, and how he is bringing peace and democracy to Iraq and the Middle East.

We know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we know Saddam never threatened our country. We know there were no chemical weapons, and we know Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Many of us also know you cannot make someone free at gunpoint, nor can you force democracy on a country.

If we stay in Iraq any longer, George will have to take the freedom, peace, and democracy off the table too, and start talking about something new, because when Iraq opens up in civil war or the American people realize we shed all of our troops blood to bring about an Islamic State, well George won't want to talk about that either, and he will have to come up with a new story.

Yesterday President Bush talked about the "amazing progress" in rebuilding Iraq, but George never says we are rebuilding Iraq because we destroyed it. Bush was telling the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington that, "Like our approach to training Iraqi Security forces, our approach to helping Iraqis rebuild has changed and improved."

An American Soldier or Marine gets about three months of training before they can expect to see combat. We have been training Iraq's new army for two years now and still there is only one unit (about 1000 men) that is ready to fight on their own. The same story is true for our "rebuild" of the country. Electrical power output and reliability are still not up to prewar standards. Every day scores of Iraqis are being killed or wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens have been displaced from their homes. Iraqi unemployment is very high, and much of the country suffers from traumatic stress.

What President Bush needs is a long trip to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities to see what is going on, but he can't do that. The country is not secure enough for a presidential trip. How can you bring peace and democracy to a country that has hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians and police, being killed every month? Nothing this president said before he attacked Iraq or is saying now has turned out to be true. I think George's next story will have to be a real whopper.