Bush again, from today's speech (actually from one of the answers, where it is actually Bush speaking, and not reading something one of his speechwriters wrote):
"And so we gave Saddam Hussein the chance to disclose or disarm, and he refused. And I made a tough decision. And knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again."He refused? "Saddam Hussein", also known as "Iraq", had not only already disarmed a decade before, but it also disclosed in thousands (or was it tens of thousands?) of pages (many of which, we recall, were confiscated by the U.S. before the rest of the world could see what they said).
So when Bush says "knowing what I know today," we can only conclude that he still doesn't know anything. Or, more likely, that he knows very well why the U.S. invaded Iraq, and that it had nothing to do with "disclosing" or "disarming."
State media
Repeating an Amy Goodman quote I've mentioned before: "If we had state media in the United States, how would it be any different?" In the post below this one, I note Bush's inaccurate answer to the question of how many Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion. Bush's answer, that 30,000 figure, is being reported, and even headlined, widely -- The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and on NBC Nightly News that I am currently watching (and no doubt on every other news outlet). Not one of them cast the slightest doubt on that 30,000 figure. Evidently, Bush's credibility has such a strong record that questioning a "fact" asserted by him is beyond the pale. Right.
One reason the news media may hesitate to question Bush's figure of 30,000 is that, prior to this, mentions of the number of Iraqi dead in the media have been few and far between. Which is directly related to this fact, noted in the NY Times:
"White House officials said that Mr. Bush based the number on public estimates of the death toll, not on an internal government accounting. The Pentagon does not keep statistics on the numbers of Iraqis killed."And because there is no "official" number, God forbid the media would actually publish the number estimated by Iraq Body Count or anyone else before it was "blessed" by the State, i.e., Bush.
For real "state media," read NBC news anchor Brian William's day-long interview with Bush. Or save time, and just look up "sycophant" in the dictionary.
The coalition: now you see it, now you don't
George Bush read a speech today. I couldn't bring myself to watch it or even read it, but one thing caught my attention -- this response to a question about how many Iraqis had died:
"Q Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I'd like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators.During the course of the speech, Bush refers to "the coalition" or "coalition forces" a total of 13 different times. Yet when it comes to referring to the people who have died, those 201 dead coalition forces from other countries are just so much cannon-fodder, not even worth mentioning.
"THE PRESIDENT: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq."
Of course, Bush doesn't even really care about the 2,140 American dead (and certainly not the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead) either. Here's the very next thing that appears in the transcript:
"Q Mr. President, thank you --
"THE PRESIDENT: I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up. (Laughter and applause.)"
The thought of being responsible for the death of 30,000+ people couldn't sober Bush up for even a second. Of course that assumes that their was actually a thought in his head to correspond with the words coming out of his mouth, which is doubtful.
Needless to say, the 30,000 number is completely bogus. Even if one doesn't accept the now quite dated 100,000 number from the Lancet study (if the Lancet study's methodology was valid, the number is now much higher than 100,000), Bush was asked about all Iraqis, including military, insurgents, etc. The 30,000 figure, which comes from Iraq Body Count, is the reported (and hence also undoubtedly low) number of civilians killed by the invasion and occupation. As I mentioned the other day, the estimate for Iraqi military killed during the initial invasion is another 30,000, and with a 10:1 ratio as a rough number, we can guess that 20,000 or so insurgents, 90+% of them Iraqi, have also been killed. That makes 80,000, not 30,000, Iraqis who are dead. Not that Bush cares.
Incidentally, earlier in the day I started a post about this same quote, based on Bush's reference to the "incursion" of Iraq. Dictionary.com defines "incursion" as "an aggressive entrance into foreign territory; a raid or invasion," but to me, and I'll bet to Bush, "invasion" is a harsh, pejorative word, while "incursion" is more of a neutral, mechanical term, and would be far more likely to apply to "raids" than to "invasions." I was going to write that I doubt anyone ever refers to the German "incursion" of Poland or the Iraqi "incursion" of Kuwait. However, some Google searching proved that theory wrong; you can indeed find people talking about "incursions" when I would have expected them to be talking about "invasions." Despite all that, I'll stand by my gut feeling, and say that Bush's avoidance of the word "invasion" was quite deliberate, not merely a random choice of words.
Update: According to Wikipedia, a recent Washington Post op-ed estimated the number of insurgents killed as 45-50,000. Putting the total number of Iraqis killed over 100,000.
