GlobalEye: PNAC got Bush to Lie in SOTU

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

http://www.tmtmetropolis.ru/metropolis/stories/2003/07/18/120.html

Global Eye -- Cake Walk

By Chris Floyd


The convoluted controversy over whether or not Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium "yellowcake" ore from Niger last year and whether or not George W. Bush should have mentioned this alleged attempted transaction in his State of the Union address last January is a classic case of fretting about a molehill when a mountainous volcano is erupting right behind you.

(snip)

But let us, too, eat cake -- or parse cake -- for a moment, resorting to the highly unusual expedient of consulting the actual facts. As Professor Norman Dombey reports in The Guardian, uranium ore is not fissile material; it can only be weaponized in elaborate enrichment plants. And all such plants in Iraq had been dismantled by UN inspectors by 1995. What's more, Saddam already had tons of the non-fissile stuff; he didn't have to go to Niger to get it, as the warmongers well know. Their lack of genuine concern over such material is shown by their failure to secure Iraq's nuclear plants after the invasion, allowing looters to cart away yellowcake by the barrelful. Thus, even if Bush and Blair somehow "prove" their scaremongering tales of African ore-shopping to be true, it doesn't matter: Iraq could not have used uranium ore from Niger -- or any other country -- for nuclear weapons.

Nor does this controversy affect the Anglo-American "case" for going to war. Despite all the blue smoke and red herrings we've seen the past two weeks, the true casus belli has been clear for months, even years. It has nothing to do with terrorism or big boogey-man weapons. It certainly has nothing to do with mass graves, Saddam's tyranny or "Iraqi freedom," none of which has ever been of the slightest concern to the architects of the aggression.

These architects -- a clique of extremist ideologues and Establishment heavies closely associated with the Bush Family -- announced their intentions publicly years ago, in September 2000. Here's what they said: "While the unresolved conflict with Saddam Hussein provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Yes, we're back in PNAC country. For those who came in late, the "Project for the New American Century" is a gaggle of right-wing war-wonks whose ranks included Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, plus a slew of other Bushist minions now swaggering along the corridors of power

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