Where Were They When We Needed Them?

By Rich Miles
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

In the October 17 issue of US News and World Report, editor in chief Mortimer Zuckerman published a scathing description of the shortcomings of the Bush administration in a back-page editorial titled "One Swampy Mess." Two days later, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff when Powell was Secretary of State, revealed much of what he knew about the Cheney-Rumsfeld 'cabal' that circumvented regular channels of decision-making in the State and Defense departments, allegedly to ram through policies including the Iraq War that otherwise might have withered under public scrutiny. And in an interview published in the Financial Times of London two days BEFORE Zuckerman, Bush 41's friend Brent Scowcroft let loose with his grave misgivings about the basic honesty and competence of his pal's son's presidency. There have been several more high-profile defections from the lockstep Republican Bush 43-as-god ideology, notably in both houses of Congress, but also including such stalwart Bushian apologists as the National Review, the Wall St. Journal, and even (gasp!) Fox News. It's starting to look like jackals on a carcass, now that the head elephant is weakened enough to be attacked, along with his coterie.

Those of us who opposed the near-election, then Supreme Court installation, then God forbid the RE-election of George W. Bush, have known at least the basic outlines of what is being said against Bush these days for at least 5 years, so the only part of the recent revelations that come as a surprise is the sheer brazen balls of these people, and the clarity of the perfidy they've perpetrated on America. Many in the blogosphere, and even a few in the MSM, have been saying things like this, with different details, for the entire time W has been on the national political radar, and some have suffered grievously for their efforts - witness Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame (who did not herself ever do anything to harm the Bush administration), Gen. Eric Shinseki, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and a host of others recently documented by Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com.

Norman Solomon, in a Perspective piece at that same web site, points out that not only have the people who knew what was really going on kept their counsel until now, when it's too late to bust Bush out of office, but that the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times, was complicit in leading the country to war, but now has taken on the self-righteous mantle of a late-arriving Cassandra, telling us now what many of us who have never supported Bush have known for years - that there are not and never were good and compelling reasons for the US to send our children to war in Iraq. Quite the contrary, the whole war was fabricated at virtually every level, as several observers said it was.

So my question to these Bush-bashers-come-lately is: where the hell were you people when we needed you?

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