Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq

As the Bushites are falling over themselves to heap praise on Gerald Ford as the man who "healed" America by pardoning Rumsfeld and Cheney's boss Richard Nixon from the valid charges against him, I wonder how they will react to the news that Ford was vehemently against their war in Iraq?

In an interview conducted for a new book, Ford - who gave permission for his comments to be released in the event of his death - was scathing about Bush's intervention in Iraq and adamant that he would not have done so had he been president.

Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously.

He also takes Bush to task over his supposed wish to advance democracy across the globe.

"Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the United States has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."

He is also highly critical of the change he says he has witnessed in Dick Cheney:

"But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious" as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell's assertion that Cheney developed a "fever" about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. "I think that's probably true."

Indeed, the death of Ford reminds us of a day when Reagan and the others who attacked his Presidency were regarded as the extreme right wing of the party. This extreme right wing went on to take over the party and now even they have been transplanted by an even more extreme bunch of neo-cons.

When Bush and his neo-con thugs claim to represent the political centre one realises just how skewered political debate has become in the United States and just how badly the US media has failed in it's duty to honestly appraise the American public about what is transpiring.

The media - and this was especially obvious in the build-up to the Iraq war - seem now simply to report verbatim what politicians are saying without asking the crucial questions concerning whether what they are saying is true or not.

Because of this tendency Bush was able to convince a majority of Americans that Saddam possessed WMD, and the fact that Blix and his inspectors were unable to find these weapons at the sites that the US felt sure they existed was taken as a further example of the uselessness of the inspectors rather than an indication of the weakness of Bush's case.

Ford is adamant that such "evidence" would not have swayed him:

Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative. "I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly," he said, "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer."

It's a gentle reminder that the current glut of Republicans are neither moderate nor conservative; they are extremists pursuing a far right wing agenda.

In any proper democracy there should exist a national press prepared to point this fact out. But we live in a very different world from the one in which Nixon was removed from office for his high crimes and misdemeanours. Woodward and Bernstein represented a press that dared to challenge their government's version of events. We now live in the world of Fox News where dissent is treachery and Republicans frequently call for anyone who challenges the presidential line to be tried as traitors. Indeed, we live in a world where people openly call for the imprisonment of the editor of the New York Times for daring to report stories of government illegality.

They say, though I'm not sure that I fully agree, that Ford healed the nation and steered the US away from troubled times.

If that is true, then the US has never since needed such a figure more than it does now.

Click title for full article.

tag: Iraq war, Bush, Cheney, Gerald Ford,