The Art of Tough by Barbara Boxer

Author:Barbara Boxer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography / Political, Biography & Autobiography / Women
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2016-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Unfortunately, President Bush made only half-hearted efforts to find Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The more bin Laden eluded him, the more he seemed to become frustrated and bored. So he listened to those hawks in his government who thought an easier target for a winnable war would be Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. I wish he had talked to his dad instead of his vice president, Dick Cheney, and the neo-cons, since George H. W. Bush knew that a war against Saddam Hussein would lead to utter chaos. That’s why the first President Bush never went into Baghdad after the successful effort to expel Saddam from Kuwait in 1990.

But Bush listened to the neo-cons, who had persuaded themselves that Saddam Hussein was a perfect foil, a highly visible saber-rattling villain with a big sneer and a black mustache to go with it. Hussein had survived and restored his power after the first Gulf War and I’ll bet that those urging W. on reminded him that Dad had left unfinished business.

Reporter and author Bob Woodward once asked W. if he had asked for his father’s opinion on whether he should go to war in Iraq. Bush answered that his earthly father was “the wrong father to appeal to for advice… there is a higher father that I appealed to.”

I was shocked by this. It worried me that President George W. Bush didn’t ask his dad, who might have known a little more history than the neo-cons who surrounded his son. Divine intervention is always a plus, but a loving father’s intervention wouldn’t have hurt in this case.

Regardless, invading Iraq was a fateful decision that harmed tens of thousands of American families, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It turned the entire Middle East upside down; the flames are still burning from his incredible blunder to this day. There are now reports that Saddam’s Baathist military is a strong component of ISIL, or ISIS or IS or Daesh—whatever that inhumane gang of monsters is called.

President Bush and his team—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—orchestrated a massive public relations campaign in the United Nations and in the media to persuade the world that Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” including poison gas and nuclear warheads that he could use against our friends in the region. The Bush administration claimed that the case for weapons of mass destruction would be a “slam-dunk.”

Ultimately it was Colin Powell, a military hero and man of integrity, who carried the day. He truly believed what the Bush team was telling him, and on February 5, 2003, told the United Nations there was “no doubt in my mind” that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Powell’s claim was the climactic moment of a well-organized publicity blitz. On September 7, 2002, Judith Miller of the New York Times reported that Bush administration officials told her, “In the last

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