Surprise – We’ve Been Lied To

Today’s news comes courtesy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and reveals that while the President and his accomplices were telling us that Saddam had contacts with Al Qaeda, CIA analysts were stating the opposite. In fact besides not wanting any relationship he was actually trying to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As reported in The Washington Post:

As recently as Aug. 21 [2006], Bush suggested a link between Hussein and Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by U.S. forces this summer. But a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein's government "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates," according to the report.

The report also highlighted the role of Iraqi exiles from the Iraqi National Congress and their disproportionate influence on the Defense Department. The CIA believed as early as 2002 that Iranian intelligence operatives infiltrated the INC and were feeding the Administration false reports. Despite this analysis, the Bush Administration responded by increasing the money we were giving the INC.

The result of all this, in addition to misleading the American public, is that we wound up doing Iran’s bidding by removing Saddam on Iran’s western border and the Taliban on their eastern border. We have spent enormous resources, weakened our position in the world while all the time enhancing a key member in the “Axis of Evil.”

Every American ought to gag whenever President Bush talks about how only he can fight the terrorist organizations arrayed against us. The incompetence of this administration at home and abroad is breath taking. If only the Democrats are smart enough to pound this message home during the next two months before the elections.

For further evidence of gross mismanagement, the Post today quoted the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps, Brig. Gen. Mark E. Scheid, who said that long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq.

Scheid was a colonel with the U.S. Central Command, the unit that oversees military operations in the Middle East, in late 2001 when Rumsfeld "told us to get ready for Iraq."

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us . . . that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4" -- plans that covered post-invasion operations such as security, stability and reconstruction, said Scheid, who is retiring in about three weeks, but "I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that."