Bush: Saddam was not responsible for 9/11

Last night President Bush addressed the nation:

I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the Nine-Eleven attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.

You'll notice that he doesn't define in which way Saddam was a threat. He simply makes the bald statement and moves on. Saddam had no WMD and was actually a threat to no-one, but Bush has long stopped caring what the truth actually is. He's becoming like Cheney, a man who lies every time he opens his mouth. Bush, likewise, now simply mouths platitudes as if repetition will somehow add gravitas. As if repeating this nonsense one more time may, finally, force our acceptance of his flawed logic.

My Administration, the Congress, and the United Nations saw the threat – and after Nine-Eleven, Saddam’s regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take.

Again, he slips into fantasy, hoping we will accept his flawed logic and forget what actually happened. United Nations did not see "the threat" and for that reason refused to give Bush the second resolution he sought. Bush is being incredibly disingenuous here.

The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

Guffaws of laughter erupt around the planet. The simple truth is that Saddam kept Iraq under better control than the US forces do and the streets of Iraq were safer when Saddam was in power than they are now, where death squads freely roam the streets.

And now the challenge is to help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfils the dreams of the nearly 12 million Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December.

Translation: "Stay the course... please... until I can pass this nightmare on to my successor."

He then warmed to his clash of civilisations theme:

"The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation," he said. "If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons."

Apart from the admission of unspecified "mistakes" -

"Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us."

- the most striking thing about Bush's address was that his central theme remains almost unchanged. It's a speech he could have made at any time in the last five years. He admitted that Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11 and that "mistakes" have been made, but apart from that it was business as usual.

He's been banging this same drum for five years now. Pretending that all of his actions are in some way a natural progression from the events of 9-11. It's bollocks. All of his responses were chosen responses. He didn't have to do any of the things that he subsequently did. He certainly didn't need to invade Iraq, the conflict that he yesterday attempted to fit into the 9-11 framework as if the invasion fitted neatly into the larger War on Terror.

I believed five years ago that America and the world would have been safer had the US chosen to make a more measured response to the events of 9-11. Bush could have chosen to vow to bring the people who committed this atrocity to justice. He didn't. He chose to "rid the world of evil-doers". He said: " This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile. And the American people must be patient."

Bush chose to define this conflict as a clash of civilisations and, in doing so, defined the parameters of the five years we have just lived through.

The last five years have seen anti-Americanism rise on an unprecedented scale across the globe, a truly astonishing feat when one considers the level of sympathy directed towards the US in the aftermath of 9-11. That anti-Americanism is mostly fuelled by Bush's actions in Iraq.

He now seeks to convince us that he had no choice and that the Iraq war was a natural consequence of the events of 9-11.

He's lying. It had nothing to do with 9-11. And he's made all of us, not just Americans, less safe.

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Tags: Bush, US, Saddam, Iraq, War on Terror, anniversary, 9-11, speech, televised, address,