President Harry S. Truman was one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. Like our current president, Truman was a wartime president. Like George W. Bush, Harry S. Truman had to make tough decisions pertaining to the lives of our soldiers.
President Truman kept a sign on his desk. It read: "The Buck Stops Here." In this way, George W. Bush is unlike Harry S. Truman.
There has been a war in Iraq for nearly 11 months, though no principal combat has taken place since last May. (Just another 254 hostile deaths of U.S. soldiers, that's all.) And now, all of a sudden, the justifications for this war are coming into question.
David Kay, former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, came out and said these exact words: "I think the weight of the evidence was not great... I found no real connection between WMD and terrorists."
This doesn't surprise a single fair-minded citizen.
This is coming after everyone in the Bush administration had said there was "no doubt" that Saddam Hussein was currently in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that he would willfully sell them to terrorists. This is coming after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had said "we know where the weapons are." We were told that there were not a few, but stockpiles of these weapons ready to be used against us and Colin Powell stood up before the United Nations saying he held in his hands the proof.
Kay's allegations are coming after a period of a year and a half when Americans were told time and time again by their elected chief of state that the existence of Iraq, as it currently stood, was an "imminent threat" to our national security.
Now, to be fair, Kay did say that he found programs developing WMD. He also said these programs were, at best, "rudimentary." (The president later exaggerated this to mean "the capacity to produce weapons," though not a single WMD manufacturing plant has been found.)
This is a very serious situation. It is not a stain on a dress, but a stain on America's credibility. In situations like this, America needs a president like Harry S. Truman: a man who would accept full responsibility for the decisions he made; a man who would allow himself to be held accountable. We need leadership.
Instead we have a president who passed the buck and blamed the intelligence agencies. Shockingly, CIA Director George Tenet responded by saying the CIA "never said there was an imminent threat."
Blind or stubborn supporters of this war will have a wide-array of justifications anyway. They will cite the eventual and hypothetical freedom of the Iraqi people, the atrocities Saddam Hussein would have continued to commit and the fact that, down the road, Saddam Hussein may have found his own WMD. (Apparently Saddam had a harder time finding WMD in Iraq than we did.)
Despite all those things being true, they are not the reasons cited to the American people. A president with an "ends justify the means" philosophy is wholly unacceptable and entirely contrary to American ideals.
Regardless of whether George W. Bush lied to us, he has undoubtedly misled us. The buck should stop on the president's desk. I believe an apology is in order.
Write to Ben at bbmcshane@bsu.edu
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