The Bush Administration's Camouflage

[Kellanved]

http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/15368/1.html

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, George Bush held one of his rare press conferences. When a reporter asked about the erroneous statement in his State of the Union address about Iraq buying uranium from Africa, Bush quickly changed the subject. He responded that he himself had "analyzed a thorough body of intelligence--good, solid, sound intelligence", and that this showed him the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power.


Once again George W. Bush has evaded explaining how the charges made against Iraq in his State of the Union speech were the product of forged documents. In a similar way, Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense, came up with a different reason for the war in Iraq in his presentation to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, July 29, 2003. He painted Saddam Hussein as a villain whose government had to be removed in Iraq. Yet just a few days earlier, Wolfowitz had explained that sending U.S. troops into a war could not be justified on the basis of wanting to change the government of another country. Only a threat to the lives of the people of the U.S., he maintained, could justify sending soldiers to war.





In the past few weeks, several articles in the press have pointed out that the Bush administration is constantly shifting the reasons given for the war against Iraq. A similar pattern of shifting reasons was used by George W. Bush's father to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq:




The American administration continually changed the reasons given to justify a war against Iraq. Such a changing string of explanations clarifies that there wasn't a good or honorable reason in the first place to justify sending massive amounts of American troops to the Gulf region. The reasons also contradicted each other.
Michael Hauben, The 1991 War Against Iraq




This article helps to provide perspective. In a way reminiscent of the lack of a legitimate justification for the 1991 war against Iraq, the current Bush administration lacks any legitimate justification for the 2003 Iraq war. What has become clear in 2003, however, is that the real, but illegitimate reasons for the war, are being hidden from the public by the Bush administration. In her article, The Neocons in Power, Elizabeth Drew writes:
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