After George W. Bush had been pressured into running for president, his handlers realized he needed a vice president. The Bush family consortium called upon Dick Cheney to begin a search to find the most qualified person, which was more than a tad ironic since W certainly did not own a resume that showed he could manage a country or was fit for the top slot. What might be the standards for a VP? Cheney, unsurprisingly, reported back that, in fact, he was the best man for the job.
A match had been made. W, incurious about the world and possessing marginally average intelligence, was smart enough to realize that he could play at the presidency while Cheney ran the world like John Galt. The future vice president, who had been Secretary of Defense under W's dad, George H. W. Bush, had finally realized the power he needed to make the planet safe for oil companies and defense contractors. The former Wyoming congressman had overseen the Gulf War for "41," and he had long thought of the liberation of Kuwait as unfinished business with Iraq.
W did, too, though. He had wanted Poppy Bush to chase Saddam's troops all the way to Baghdad and toss out the dictator. Cheney would not have to work hard to convince W that Iraq was wrapped up in Al Qaeda and Afghanistan was a secondary issue. W just didn't care, and he wasn't about to do the reading of historical intelligence necessary to find out or ask third party experts. Plus, an invasion of Iraq gave him a chance to do what he loved more than anything: show up the old man. He'd get Saddam and his gun and his dad would see what a real man he was, not some dry hole diggin' West Texas loser who couldn't get into Harvard Business School on his own and had to quit his National Guard pilot's commission because he got "skeert" when landing jets.
Cheney got elected and let Bush live in the White House. W got to watch movies in his own theatre, had people bring him whatever he wanted to eat, and travel on a big jet plane with an office for him to sit and prop up his boots. Cheney, meanwhile, brought in Donald Rumsfeld, a pal from their Gerald Ford days, and had W make him defense secretary. The C&R Railroad ran on big oil and defense contractors and when big ol' jet airliners crashed into the Twin Towers, Cheney and Rumsfeld were ready to execute a plan.
Even the redacted 9/11 Commission pages show C&R were working toward a regime change in Iraq prior to the New York City attacks. W liked the idea, too, but he wasn't extensively involved until things were rolling toward war. The day the towers fell, Rumsfeld's aide was taking notes from a meeting that proved the defense secretary was going to find a way to make war. He asked for the "best info fast...judge whether good enough to hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) @ same time....not only UBL (Osama bin Laden.)"
Nobody knew anything yet about NYC but that same day C&R were plotting war. By November, they were polishing talking points, trying to develop a pretext for war. One of the documents from their meetings suggests ideas like "U.S. discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or anthrax attacks." There were none, of course, but the next idea in the same talking points memo delivers them to their final solution. "Dispute over WMD inspections?"
Where was President Bush? Not that involved with the guys who were really running the world. They weren't overly concerned with reporting to the boss. Might be a little complicated for him to process. C&R then got the Pentagon to set up something called the Office of Special Plans (OSP.) Chickenhawk Paul Wolfowitz, a C&R ally, ran the OSP and used it to repurpose previously discredited intelligence and to stovepipe intel to Cheney and Rumsfeld without running it past analysts. Essentially, they rumanged through intelligence garbage cans looking for something they could reframe as fact.
Wolfowitz was later quoted as saying the U.S. had no choice but to invade Iraq because "it floated on a sea of oil." There were no WMD. Saddam was not connected to 911. He had only made the mistake of being a bad man in a land with oil beneath the ground. W told his yellow cake uranium lie to congress, the New York Times and reporter Judy Miller spewed back the nonsense to America that Cheney and Rumsfeld were spewing at W, and we were off to kill the guilty and the innocent with the same malice. Of course, General Colin Powell first had to go before the U.N. and force the bile up from his gut that made him destroy his reputation and back the lies about WMD.
George W. Bush was a minor player in our latest American tragedy. His role was as mouthpiece for the tapestry of untruths woven by Cheney and Rumsfeld. And when the truth about WMD was finally known, W deflected further inquiry by blaming the intelligence community instead of the two men who had cooked the data and sent it to him with their pleadings to attack. If he'd had his preference, W would have stayed in that Florida classroom reading about pet goats until he got to go back to Texas.
George W. Bush is complicit in war crimes. There ought not be any building in Dallas or any other American city that bears his name. He violated the Geneva Conventions with extraordinary rendition and torture, preemptively invaded a country that had done nothing to the U.S., and killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, tossed over the Constitution to eavesdrop on private citizens, cut taxes to the wealthy and corporations just as he launched two wars, and wasted what is now trillions of dollars to leave Iraq a bigger mess than when Cheney and Rumsfeld decided the president ought to decide we needed to invade.
And now they are dedicating a presidential library to W in order to maintain the historical spin. More money and time and American spirit expended on a troubled and insecure little man who only ran for the White House because of family, business, and party obligations. If there has to be a library on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, let it be named after the man who actually ran the country, and not the man who simply nodded his head in affirmation. Let's call it the "Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney Presidential Library."
And remember that "Dick" part is pretty important.
Also at: http://www.moorethink.com