[IWE] What Bush Meant
Ashton Brown
iwe@warhead.org.uk
Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:28:22 -0700
Ron Suskind at Esquire seems to have assembled a competent
non-hyperbolic history of what we've been through.
Anyone know of a better [<12 Volume] summing up?
Style sample -
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I also learned from another source, Bush's first treasury secretary,
Paul O'Neill, that at President Bush's very first National Security
Council meeting, in January 2001, finding a rationale for overthrowing
the regime of Saddam Hussein topped the agenda.
I learned that the president's message-makers derided the rest of us who
live in the "reality-based community," as opposed to the alternate
reality that they saw it in their power to create.
And most recently I learned that the White House was apprised by the
Iraqi intelligence chief in January 2003--well in advance of the
war--that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed no weapons of mass
destruction and had no such active weapons programs. The intelligence
chief, in his secret back-channel meetings, also described the mind of
Saddam--his fear of the Iranians finding out he was weaponless--which
explained his odd prewar behavior. When this fact was borne out after
the invasion, the White House directed that a fraudulent document be
created to establish a connection between the Iraqi regime and the
leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta. (This document miraculously
materialized in Baghdad in December 2003.)
A common thread running through all of these discoveries is a basic
misunderstanding of--or disregard for--the limits of presidential power.
Indeed, this ahistoric president seems to have never appreciated just
how hard-won are the institutions of American liberty. Article II of the
United States Constitution grants stunning power to the president, power
almost beyond imagining to be entrusted to one man. But for George Bush
and Dick Cheney, it wasn't enough. And so, with a level of secrecy that
betrayed a basic mistrust of the American people, they proceeded to
expand the awesome power of the presidency and in the process upset the
balance of powers designed by the founders. And in this, the president
and vice-president found their greatest success. In fact, this
presidency has succeeded spectacularly in the project that most mattered
to Bush and Cheney, and that is putting the United States on a more
authoritarian footing.
[. . .]
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http://www.esquire.com/features/what-bush-meant-1008