The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.
Radio Address of George W. Bush, September 28, 2002
Something critical is being lost in the torrent of pixels being spilled by the media as Jeb Bush wriggles haplessly, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber, struggling to explain away, recast or rationalize his brother’s hideous legacy. Many of us with functional memories concluded long ago that Jeb’s brother deliberately lied us into a pointless war, one that resulted in pointless maiming and pointless deaths of our own soldiers and perhaps a million Iraqi civilians, and the equally pointless rise of a nihilistic cult of deluded savages we know as ISIS.
And although many Americans, for various reasons, don’t want to face up to it, that is the truth. There may be be a “competing narrative,” there may be political “spin,” but there really can only be one truth, and Jeb Bush and the secretive Billionaires who hope to install him as the country’s next President know that truth happens to be very, very inconvenient for him when the country has not yet forgotten what happened the last time a Bush occupied that office. When Jeb said he’d rely on his trusted brother for foreign policy advice, well, that just made things worse.
There is, however, an even more heinous aspect to what Jeb’s “trusted brother” did, and it shouldn’t be allowed to escape down the memory hole. We’ve been lied into wars before, with similar disastrous results. But George W. Bush did something far worse than lie us into a war: he did it in a breathtakingly cynical and malevolent way–in effect, by holding a gun to every Americans’ head and threatening to pull the trigger. He did it by holding us–all of us–hostage to a twisted ideology that demanded the war, waving the gun at calculated intervals in our face, the way any terrorist would. And he told us flat out, over and over again, that if we didn’t do what he said, we’d all be killed.