Bush Lies, People Die

Some of the forces opposed to the war in Iraq shouted this phrase during the administration of ill-reputed former President George Bush.

This phrase is now being recalled in Bush’s memoirs of his ill-fated administration. The bulk of these memoirs talks about his war on Iraq, for which he refused to apologize, despite the collapse of all the allegations that his team had made and that he had used as justification.

In his memoirs, Bush continues — as during the years of his administration — his course of lies and claims to be surprised and shocked by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, ignoring all the data that confirmed this fact, including the later leak of reports from the CIA — which was officially commissioned to fabricate “evidence” of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, according to the wretchedly melodramatic presentation that Secretary of State Colin Powell made to the U.N. Security Council on the alleged weapons, where he presented a proposal that he later regretted.

Bush made no mention of lying about the alleged relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al-Qaida and then cited it as justification for the war. Furthermore, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder immediately contradicted the third lie in his memoirs. Bush had claimed that Schroeder had supported the war in Iraq.

The most important lie in Bush’s memoirs is his denial that the interests of Israel and Iraq’s oil were the real impetus for the war. This fact has been repeatedly confirmed by eminent American politicians and intellectuals, most notably John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who said, “There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in shaping the decision for war. Without the Lobby’s efforts, the United States would have been far less likely to have gone to war.”

Bush continues to lie, while millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regions of the world have been killed and continue to be killed as a result of wars waged under the banner of fighting terrorism — wars for which the killer neither found reason to apologize nor to sympathize with the victims. Even if he did regret it, it would be worthless anyway.