Bush's Ever Shifting Absolutes
by Sydney H. Schanberg
April 2 - 8, 2003
A puzzled America watches now as the Bush imperial public-relations samurai try to behead the notion that they were the mongers who planted the vision of a quick and practically painless war. The recorded evidence doesn't help their case.
Their cocky drumroll oratory has been with us for many months. Vice President Dick Cheney, for one, told America that Saddam Hussein's regime was "a house of cards." We could expect the war to last "weeks rather than months," Cheney said just two weeks ago. Every once in a while, the president and his minions would protect themselves with a few words about possible unforeseen complications, but the thumping central message was that the invasion and conquest of Iraq would be easy. The nation was told relentlessly that our technological superiority and complete command of the skies would demolish the dictator like a plaster of paris statue and send Iraqis into the streets by the thousands to hail their liberators.
Some or even much of this may still happen?as I write, American units about 60 miles south of Baghdad are reported making early probes at Iraqi forces ringing the capital?but it will not change the fact that this president humbugged and lulled the public into acceptance of war. He has dealt them a shameless series of half truths, erasures of history, allegations without tangible proof, allegations without any proof and just plain stable droppings, the final one being the whopper that the war would be a cakewalk. No war?not even his father's Tinkertoy invasion of Panama City in 1989, where earsplitting rock music was used to try to stun Manuel Noriega (once the CIA's favorite money-launderer and drug dealer south of the border) out of the church building he'd fled into for sanctuary?could be a cakewalk.
Bush's Ever-Changing Absolutes
by Sydney H. Schanberg
April 2 - 8, 2003
A puzzled America watches now as the Bush imperial public-relations samurai try to behead the notion that they were the mongers who planted the vision of a quick and practically painless war. The recorded evidence doesn't help their case.
Their cocky drumroll oratory has been with us for many months. Vice President Dick Cheney, for one, told America that Saddam Hussein's regime was "a house of cards." We could expect the war to last "weeks rather than months," Cheney said just two weeks ago. Every once in a while, the president and his minions would protect themselves with a few words about possible unforeseen complications, but the thumping central message was that the invasion and conquest of Iraq would be easy. The nation was told relentlessly that our technological superiority and complete command of the skies would demolish the dictator like a plaster of paris statue and send Iraqis into the streets by the thousands to hail their liberators.
Some or even much of this may still happen?as I write, American units about 60 miles south of Baghdad are reported making early probes at Iraqi forces ringing the capital?but it will not change the fact that this president humbugged and lulled the public into acceptance of war. He has dealt them a shameless series of half truths, erasures of history, allegations without tangible proof, allegations without any proof and just plain stable droppings, the final one being the whopper that the war would be a cakewalk. No war?not even his father's Tinkertoy invasion of Panama City in 1989, where earsplitting rock music was used to try to stun Manuel Noriega (once the CIA's favorite money-launderer and drug dealer south of the border) out of the church building he'd fled into for sanctuary?could be a cakewalk.
Bush's Ever-Changing Absolutes
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