By Ahamad Amr
The first lie you’ll encounter in ‘Decision Points’ is the identity of the author; Bush didn’t write no damn book and if I’m wrong about that, I’ll eat the shoe that Iraqi journalist threw at him. ‘Decision Points’ is a hoax as transparent as Clifford Irving’s fake autobiography of Howard Hughes.
Take a good look at the man who held the title of POTUS for eight years – he looks jittery and it’s worth speculating if he’s back on the bottle. I’m not suggesting that Bush is stupid. You need to be awful crafty to regurgitate the same WMD lies for eight years. I’m just saying that the ex-president was in no mental state to write a book – certainly not a book of this size. The entire book was probably farmed out to some Neo-con boiler room operation. The word is already out that Condi Rice vetted the doctored manuscript before it made its way to the printing press. I can see Bush now patting Rice on the back “Condi, you did a heck of a snow job.”
The ex-president’s Neo-con handlers and their entrenched operatives in the main stream media will do their best to cover up his crimes and as well as theirs. It’s not that they’re worried about their reputations. They’re worried about the legal consequences.
The real mystery is who really authored the fictional autobiography. I’ll grant that there’s a distinct possibility that if you give a zillion monkeys access to a computer, one of them will pound out a three page masterpiece. But if I’m not mistaken, George Bush doesn’t know how to use a word processor. Seriously, if Bush actually wrote a book, I’d be the first to eat it.
By all accounts, ‘Deception Points’ is no Mea Culpa. Among Bush’s few regrets is a photo taken of him as he did a fly by to see what the Hurricane Katrina commotion was all about. POTUS is still fuming about the rapper that said he ‘didn’t care about black people.’ Yet Bush professes no remorse over the millions of Iraqis that were killed, maimed and fled into exile as a result of his misadventures in MessOnPotamia. You can take this to the bank; George Bush doesn’t care about Iraqi people.
I expect the pundits will find it easy enough to pick through the weapons of mass deception fairy tales or pounce on the ex-president for being a self-confessed torturer who took the precaution of consulting a Dick Cheney appointed lawyer before approving water boarding and who knows what else. There’s no question that Bush and his accomplices lied about the phantom WMDs and that’s that. There was no intelligence failure and everybody with a lick of sense knows it.
Say what you will about the American intelligence community but never discount their capabilities. If Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson knew the WMD ‘evidence’ was fabricated, so did a whole bunch of other people in the CIA.
The decision to invade Iraq was a result of a failure of judgment not a failure of intelligence. Blinded by their ideological passions, Bush and his Likudnik neo-con advisers bet that their Iraqi venture would be a cake-walk and a slam dunk. WMDs or no WMDs, very few Americans would have complained about an easy and swift victory. And let’s give Bush credit. He was right – for a few months. Check out the president’s approval ratings in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Even when things started getting a little wobbly, Rumsfeld famously scoffed “we don’t do quagmires.”
By the time Bush realized he was wading neck deep in a quagmire, Rumsfeld started contemplating the “long hard slog ahead.” Seven years later, we have a clear idea of where the trillion dollar Neo-Con inspired slog led us. Iraq has emerged as a blood soaked chaotic landscape where Shiite theocrats and radicalized Sunnis going at each other. Today’s Iraq is ranked as one of the most corrupt and unstable countries in the world. So I’m just curious about something. When God told Bush to invade Iraq, did he mention anything about the potential decimation of one of the largest and most ancient Christian communities in the Middle East?
Moving on to the crazy decision to disband the Iraqi army – Bush’s phantom biographers are again pointing an accusatory finger at Paul Bremer for making that disastrous decision. If I recall, the Neo-Con praetorian guards tried to pull this off back in 2007. Fortunately, Paul Bremer refused to fall on his sword and turned around and handed documents to the New York Times proving that Bush knew in advance of the plan to dissolve Saddam’s military. The notion that the senior American envoy to Iraq would be left with the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was absurd on its face. When Bush was called out on it by Robert Draper, this was his response – “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “this is the policy, what happened?’”
What else did Bush and his ghostwriters forget? I doubt the book mentions anything about Bush’s role in giving American occupation forces standing orders to turn a blind eye to Iraqi government death squads and ignore the torture dungeons operated by the vicious Wolf Brigades. That decision was in line with the Bush Administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition. No worries. Bush had Cheney’s lawyers sign off on that policy too.
There is no doubt in my mind that “Decision Points” is a hoax – a bit of revisionist Neo-Con history to fog our collective memories of Bush’s atrocities. And I’ll tell you who knows it’s a hoax – Random House, the publishers. Don’t boycott the book because there’s no Bush book to boycott. Trust me – Bush didn’t write no damn book.
– Ahmed Amr is the former editor of NileMedia.com and the author of “The Sheep and the Guardians – Diary of a SEC Sanctioned Swindle.” He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
