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Bush's Regrets Show He's No Man Of Peace

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By TOM TEEPEN Cox News Service

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 16, 2008

In a recent interview with the Times of London, President Bush revived a regret that he had expressed before, that he sometimes during the Iraq war resorted to gung-ho language which, he believes, left an impression that he relished the war. That impression, Bush has suggested, was false.

His "bring 'em on" and "dead or alive" bravura, Bush said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

Well, yes, rather.

And the more the details behind the war are filled in, and the more we learn about the way it was waged, the less peaceable the president appears, and not just as a matter of his gunslinger rhetoric.

The completed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the lead-up to our invasion of Iraq, recently released, concludes that to sell the war, the president, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration made exaggerated claims against Saddam Hussein that were not supported by credible intelligence.

That was crucially so of the administration's repeated charges that Hussein was in working cahoots with al-Qaida and that Iraq not only had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program but had reconstituted it to such a degree it posed an imminent danger to the United States.

This was the second half of a study on intelligence failures that the committee's Republicans, then still a Senate majority, suppressed before the 2004 election. That suppression left the public to believe, during Bush's re-election campaign, that in starting the war he had acted soundly on unsound intelligence.

If not Bush personally at first, certainly major players in his security team had come to office in 2000 itching for an excuse for "regime change" in Iraq. They had been rankled since the successful conclusion of the Gulf war that the first President Bush had not pressed on then to unhorse Hussein.

After 9/11, Bush signed on fully with the war party within his circle, and the White House's enthusiasm for the war becomes additionally evident the more we learn about the extremes it has gone to in the war's conduct.

The U.S. military attorney for a Canadian held at Guantanamo said recently that a Pentagon manual shown to him by military prosecutors encouraged interrogators to destroy notes about their methods so as to "minimize certain legal issues."

And we now know that in 2002 the FBI warned the Defense Department - futilely, alas - that its harsh interrogation methods would enflame Muslims and undermine the opportunities for intelligence cooperation.

Bush's has been from its start an administration heedless of any voices from within its ranks, and worse than contemptuous of any from without, that counseled caution about rushing into Iraq or prudence overall in the conduct ordered, or indulged, under the cover of a war on terrorism.

When President Bush regrets the extremes in his war rhetoric, he really regrets only that he sometimes spoke aloud in terms that accurately reflected what he was thinking and how he was acting.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.

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