Christopher Ruddy
Monday, July 14, 2003

The latest case in point: the non-issue of President Bush’s fleeting reference to intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger.

In hindsight, the Bush administration honestly admits the evidence wasn’t strong enough to have made that specific statement. The British disagree, however. They say they have seen the evidence and it’s true.

So what? The war against Iraq was never waged because of the Niger evidence. Nor was it waged because we had definite evidence Saddam was behind Sept. 11.

After Sept. 11, President Bush warned that terrorism would loom over us unless we dealt with the nations behind terrorism. He named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the most dangerous, “the Axis of Evil.”

All, said President Bush, were developing weapons of mass destruction.

In an age when anthrax, a poor man’s atom bomb or a “dirty nuke” – plutonium encased in dynamite – could be easily produced and deployed against us, the threat is real.

There was little political reason for Bush to wage this war. It was fraught with risk for him and the nation. Because he is so committed to dealing with terrorism before we see weapons of mass destruction used in New York or elsewhere in our nation, he was willing to take those risks.

Saddam: Top of the Clinton Terror List

We knew that Saddam was put at the top of terrorist threat list, not by the Bush administration, but by the Clinton administration.

In 1998, Clinton said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, was developing still more weapons, and would use them at some point. Nobody in the media accused him of politicizing intelligence data. (Nor did the media accuse him of manipulating data for his “wag the dog” war against Serbia – when, after the war, no evidence of genocidal atrocities was ever found.)

The State Department has had Iraq on its list of rogue nations sponsoring terrorism for years, well before Bush showed up in the White House.

As Notra Trulock notes: “The clearest public expression of the intelligence community’s judgments on Iraqi WMD may be found on the CIA’s Internet Web site. Posted in October 2002, the community judged that Iraq had continued its WMD programs, it had chemical and biological weapons, and ‘left unchecked,’ it would probably have a nuclear weapon in this decade.”

If the major media were exposing a real crime committed by the Bush administration, I would say let them do it.

But this media campaign is nothing more than one orchestrated to undermine the president’s popularity and boost Democratic chances for 2004.

So far, the media’s drumbeat is working. The president’s overall approval rating has sagged, and his rating for his handling of Iraq had dropped a precipitous 21 points from April, falling from 74 percent to 53 percent.

The one poll that the public needs to remember is the one taken in 1992. The Roper study found that 89 percent of the Washington press corps said they voted for Bill Clinton, as opposed to 6 percent for the elder Bush.

Clearly, the left-wing media will do anything to elect a Democrat in 2004.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
George W. Bush
Media Bias
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
War on Terrorism

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