2016 May 24^th

There is not a bit of outrageous political news on which to comment today so I present a blog from exactly one year ago when the object of my affection was George Will; it follows:

May 24^th

George Will today is writing about war legitimacy. Mr. Will has only a distant acquaintance with war, having been a college student majoring in religion at Trinity University in 1962 and hence surely draft exempt during the Viet Nam War. His involvement now is entirely on the political side, rather like the boy who, hoping for a spectacle, says to his friend, “Let’s you and him fight.” (I must apologize here to the Council of Oxford University for mistakenly asserting in a previous blog that Mr. Will had earned a doctorate from Oxford University. He earned only an M.A. there; his doctorate was from Princeton University.)

Mr. Will is concerned that the Congress does not exercise sufficient control over our military involvement abroad. He cites the Kaine-McCain legislation as a way to more completely involve Congress. This isn’t likely to matter. Seventy percent of Congress voted to approve Bushes’ invasion of Iraq. The reason was the administration’s insistence that Iraq had, or would soon have, “methods of mass destruction,” WMDs; by that they meant atomic weapons.

Some in Congress didn’t believe the CIA briefing; for example Congressman Ron Paul claimed the CIA man’s body language convinced him that the man was lying. Lincoln Chaffee, the only Republican Senator to vote against the resolution, claimed the metal tubes presented as evidence could have been bought at any hardware store. Well, maybe, but the main point here is that regardless of the power Congress wields, its members will vote according to the intelligence they are given; control the intelligence, which any administration does, and you control how Congress will vote.

In an attempt to bolster its position that Iraq had, or was planning to produce, WMDs, the administration sent a senior diplomat, Joseph Wilson, to Niger in search of evidence that Saddam Hussein was buying yellow cake uranium, a basic material for the production of WMDs. He came back without it; indeed convinced that they were doing no such thing. This so infuriated the administration that Robert Novak, a right wing talking head, took his revenge against Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent. Novak’s outing of Valerie Plame would ordinarily be a treasonable offense but not for those as well-connected to the Bush-Cheney government as Robert Novak.

Ultimately no WMDs were found, and that’s in spite of very intensive searching. Now there is a revisionist position that those who claimed the Bush-Cheney people were lying about WMDs were themselves lying. What next?

Now a year later I can add that Lt. General Thomas G. McInerney (Ret. Thank heaven) tells us that the Russians, Chinese and French were responsible for secretly slipping into Iraq and spiriting away all of those awful WMDs as well as any race of their existence.The General could make a comfortable living in retirement as a writer of fiction.