Question of credibility
Two top presidential advisors took to the Sunday news show circuits to say their boss shouldn’t have said in his State of the Union address that Iraq was shopping for uranium. Yet, both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claim the statement was true. What else would they be expected to say at this point? President Bush hammered at the evils perpetrated by Iraq in the build up to a war that he was willing to lead America into, even if the rest of the world disagreed. The president played on Americans greatest fear of a nuclear holocaust by stating unequivocally that British intelligence sources reported Iraq entered into discussions with Niger, the world’s third-largest producer of mined uranium. It has since turned out those documents that provided the basis for this suspicion were forged. Our own intelligence agency, the CIA, wasn’t convinced, had deleted a similar reference from an earlier Bush speech yet allowed it to stand in the State of the Union address.
Rumsfeld and Rice are now claiming that the British have independent evidence that the Iraq-Niger link was true, but that the source of the information is so sensitive that it can’t be divulged. Pardon us if we remain skeptical.
Rice also said, “It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa. This was a part of a very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union and other places.”
Indeed, the president harped for months about Saddam Hussein’s massive weapons of mass destruction program and the imminent threat posed to Americans should he not be reigned in immediately. No strong and convincing evidence has yet surfaced in Iraq to prove this statement. It might someday, and we would hope for our country’s global integrity that it does, but taking as fact the forged uranium documents tends to make us queasy about the rest of Bush’s talking points. When the president speaks, especially of such important life and death manners, and in such an important speech as his annual address to Congress, Americans expect to hear facts that will withstand the veracity test.
The president on Monday said, “When I gave the speech the line was relevant.” To what? His quest to set the country’s mindset on a course of war?
“When all is said and done the people of the United States will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program,” Bush said. We certainly hope so, Mr. President.