Hope historians tell truth about Bush
As we near the end of President George W. Bush's disastrous tenure, there has been much discussion in the media regarding how his legacy will be perceived. I believe history will show that Bush wanted to "get Saddam" from his first day in office. The Twin Towers tragedy gave Bush an opportunity to slyly hint at a connection between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11, which, by and large, the American people swallowed hook, line and sinker. As far as lots of Democrats going along with Bush, remember that he cleverly "rolled out" his plan just before the 2002 elections, knowing that opposition to giving the President authority to invade Iraq would lead to defeats in many of those House and Senate races because the candidates would appear to be "unpatriotic." Those relatively few members of Congress who opposed Bush's scheme ought to be viewed favorably, along with senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who cast the only "no" votes on the hoked-up Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, which gave President Lyndon Johnson full authority to wage war in Vietnam. Four decades after the quagmire that was Vietnam, we find ourselves in another one: Iraq. Both were wars of choice, not necessity. My own analogy has been that Americans are in a state of denial. They don't want to admit that the war was a mistake, because this would mean more than 4,000 members of our military have died "in vain." But, in the beginning, it was not Congress or the American people who were fabricating intelligence and pushing for war; it was George Bush, Dick Cheney and all their neocon sycophants. As a result, we have today an Iraq that is worse off in terms of security, infrastructure, environment and people's living conditions than it was under Saddam, as bad as he was. Bush's policies have spat in the face of the economy, the Constitution, the military, the Geneva Conventions, civil liberties and the rule of law. George W. Bush is not just the worst President in our country's history, he is one of the lowest forms of human life in the modern era. I hope that historians don't go easy on him; the truth regarding his administration's malfeasance needs to be told and understood by the citizens of tomorrow so that they might catch on to the lies of future despots before it's too late.
Bob Friend
Wauconda