Bend it like Bush, and use Orwellian euphemisms!

Mindful that lying has serious legal consequences, and under intense pressure from the press, the Bush people will allow that the President may have "exaggerated" the Iraqi danger. That is Orwellian for deceit and lying. Of course President Bush is not alone in demolishing the truth when it blocked his way. Lyndon B. Johnson had lied about Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon had lied about Watergate, Ronald Reagan had lied about Iran-Contra, and Bill Clinton had lied about his sexual dalliances. None of them, however, led the nation into a pre-emptive war "on the wings of a lie." Let us rewind to the beginning of the preparation for the Iraqi war. It is not that the critics are going after the president after the hostilities have ended. As the President was becoming more and more shrill in his pronouncement of an imminent Iraqi threat, critics were constantly pointing out that all of what the President had said was speculation; he had not provided any shred of evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat. Without explicitly using the L-word, Democratic Senator Bob Graham, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who sat in on all the classified intelligence briefings, accused President Bush "of a pattern of deception and deceit" on Iraq. Reports say that "Vice president Dick Cheney made several visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters to pressure low level specialists interpreting raw intelligence" on Iraq. At a close door Senate Intelligence Committee hearing recently, State Department's intelligence analyst Christian Westermann accused the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, Mr. John Bolton, of pressuring him to make his reports more pro-war. Mr. Bolton is well-known for his passionate support for Israel.

The truth is, Mr. Bush would not have been able to make his case for war with the truth. According to Donald F. Kettl of University of Wisconsin, Mr. Bush had " to find a way that is powerful and persuasive and politically attractive and tap into what the public can grab." Iraq's possession of "weapons of mass destruction," and posing of "imminent threat to the US" did the trick. According to David E. Rosenbaum of The New York Times: "in hindsight, the threat of banned weapons, genuine or not, does not seem to have been, as the president was suggesting, the decisive motivation for going to war. More central reasons -- his desire to dominate the Middle East and remove a dictator whose defiance made the United States seem weak would have been harder to sell politically." Mr. Rosenbaum could also have added that grabbing a country with the world's second largest oil reserves and destroying another of Israel's enemies could have been the other motives. The buffoon that he was, Saddam never realised that he was going to pay a heavy price for giving money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, who killed Israelis. There is another theory. After September 11, the Bush people were so mad that they needed to attack some country and smash some heads. The cakewalk in Afghanistan was not enough to assuage their anger. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's plea to attack the pompous, yet toothless Iraqi dictator proved too irresistible!

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The history of the last three years has demonstrated that the Bush strategists will stoop to any level to get their way. They are the masters of the last minute smear campaign. When Republican Senator John McCain posed a threat to George W. Bush's nomination for President in early 2000, dark suggestions were planted in the press that Senator McCain, the highly decorated Vietnam war hero, might have committed treason in the Vietnamese prison (where he languished for five years), and that he had fathered a child with a black prostitute (Senator McCain's adopted daughter, Brigitte, is from Bangladesh.) President Bush realised that to execute his agenda he needed both the House and Senate under Republican control. Since the Senate was in the hands of the Democrats before the November 2002 elections, Bush strategy was to win back the Senate. As the race for Senator from Georgia was tightening, President Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, ran TV commercials accusing the sitting Democratic Senator Max Cleland of being soft on national security. Interesting, because Senator Cleland is also a much decorated war hero who lost both his legs fighting for his country in Vietnam. President Bush, on the other hand, avoided service in Vietnam through his father's influence, enlisted in Texas Air National Guard, which he left eight months early, and where his attendance was erratic. For Karl Rove, there is no shame in character assassination; the only shame is in losing an election. If the Democrats still held the Senate, they would have been investigating, a la Watergate, whether President Bush lied to the Congress and the nation. But the Republicans regained the Senate in 2002, freeing the President to pursue his Iraqi agenda unchallenged and uninvestigated. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is not getting such a free ride. Blair's alleged prevarications are being investigated by the British Parliament.

The Democrats are outraged that ordinary Americans do not seem to care that Mr. Bush may have lied to them. Conservative guru and former education Secretary William Bennett (who recently admitted to being a compulsive gambler) wrote a book decrying the public's lack of outrage during Mr. Clinton's sex scandal. It may be recalled that as the Republicans were trying to impeach President Clinton, his approval rating hovered around 70 per cent. The fact is, Americans like a winner. With two Presidential election victories under his belt and a booming economy, Clinton was considered a winner, and thus beyond reproach. Among the white Americans, mostly the Jews and the white clergy marched shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he pursued civil rights for the American blacks in the 1960s. The Southern whites, and many whites in the North were deadly opposed to it. Now that the civil rights laws have been enacted and the blacks are gaining more economic and political clout, the impression one gets is that civil rights struggle was a good thing, and that everyone was for it! Similarly, coincident with the empowerment of the Jewish Americans, anti-Semitism has decreased and America's love for Israel has increased. President Bush's easy victories in Afghanistan and Iraq have made him a winner. Average Americans are simply not interested in how he won.

The problem for Mr. Bush is the war's aftermath. It was pointed out in this column that America can win any war on its own; but America cannot win peace on its own. The rosy picture presented to the Americans, that the Iraqis will welcome the American soldiers with flowers has not materialised. American soldiers are being greeted with bullets. After accusing "Saddam loyalists" for the attacks at first, it is now acknowledged that the attacks are uncoordinated and spontaneous. The decision to bypass the UN, and go to war only with the UK alongside it, is coming back to haunt America. Iraqi resistance has killed over 60 American soldiers since President Bush declared the hostilities over in Iraq on May 1. At this rate, before the end of the year, more American soldiers will be killed in Iraq after the war, than during it. Such guerilla attacks indicate that the Iraqis are viewing the Americans as not liberators, but occupiers. Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, Americans are beginning to express concern about the war's aftermath. Last month, 28 per cent were concerned; this month, 44 per cent are. Some truths, such as the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, cannot be spun away. Mr. Bush's coalition partner Prime Minister Tony Blair is also finding out that Orwellian euphemisms cannot reverse the finality of the recent ambush-death of six British soldiers in Iraq. Isn't it intriguing that the personally honourable Englishman "George Orwell" (the writer's pen name), who through his writings and characters invented the language of political spin, was actually born in Bengal in 1903, and that his real name is Eric BLAIR!