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Sunday Insight AT A TIME when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the president's recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique -- which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mes s in the first place. The basic claim of the president's desperate and strident attack on the w ar's critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus preside nt when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq a s a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by mos t in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship, al Qaeda's sworn enemy. And a recently declassifi ed 2002 document proves that Bush's "evidence" for this, available to to p administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness. Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he bas ically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricke d us. "Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is i rresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the Amer ican people," the president said at an Air Force base in Alaska. "Leader s in my administration and members of the United States Congress from bo th political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reache d the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat." saying Hussein was a threat -- to some body, somewhere, in some context -- is not the same as endorsing a pre-e mptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatan tly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senator s and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the president of the United States is just a lie on its face -- it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally. It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate whic h did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq -- the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee -- shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican president. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House a nd Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the e ntire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated. The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative re port, DITSUM No. This smoking-gun document p roves the Bush administration's key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bi n Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance -- said by Bush to involve training in t he use of weapons of mass destruction -- was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably "intentionally misle ading the debriefers." Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon' s intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight month s later, on the eve of the Senate's vote to authorize the war, that "we' ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poi sons and gases." The false al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush's argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons i nspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but tha t they would not be found at all. Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, US fighter jet s patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his border s, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush W hite House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops -- re ferences to "a mushroom cloud" and calling Hussein an "ally" of al Qaeda -- to convince the rest of us it was necessary. The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (e xaggerating the threat). Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq t he central front in a new Cold War, never acknowledging that he has hand ed al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his "Axis of Evil" member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush administrat ion officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Ch alabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed US sec rets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Ir aq by campaigning on anti-US slogans. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country. Note to readers Columnist Robert Scheer has been a frequent contributor to this page in r ecent years. Scheer's departure from the Los Angeles Times, which had been his "home" newspaper for the past 13 years, opened an opportunity for Chronicle rea ders to get first look at his column each week. We seized the opportunit y Many readers have been telling us they want to see more of Scheer's disti nct and often provocative perspective on state, national and internation al issues. As part of our arrangement as his new home paper, Scheer's column will be edited through The Chronicle and we will have a chance to discuss ideas with him -- though he will make the final call on topics for his column , which will continue to be distributed through the Creators Syndicate.
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