The Buck Stops - ?

Bush has finally accepted responsibility for invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence. Here's what he said:

It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.

And I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that.

Rewind... Play again:

It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong -

Stop right there.

Yes, the intelligence was wrong. But that was only the intelligence that Bush and his top officials - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith and others - hand-picked to support their predetermined course of action. Let's not forget that pesky Downing Street Memo, whose authenticity has never been officially denied:

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

So "what went wrong" was not really the faulty intelligence, it was how that intelligence was mis-used by the Bush administration. Dick Cheney set up a special Office of Special Plans for just that reason!

Play:

As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. And I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong -

Stop.

If Bush is really going to take responsibility for that decision, rather than just saying that he takes responsibility, then there is really only one thing to do - FIRE THE WHOLE DAMNED ADMINISTRATION AND THEN RESIGN!

Because Bush was so personally involved in the lies, he cannot now claim responsibility for "fixing what went wrong". He has lost the moral authority to remain as Head Of State. You don't send a thief to catch a thief.

Instead of resigning, however, Bush says he will fix what went wrong. How?

Play...

- by reforming our intelligence capabilities.

Stop. Now what does that mean, aside from giving George Tenet the Medal Of Honour and installing a Bush cabal insider as the new "intelligence czar"?

It means gagging whistle-blowers like Sibel Edmonds while ousting agents like Valerie Plame. It means kidnapping people off the streets and rendering them to secret prisons where they can be tortured. Not for real intelligence, mind you, but for politically expedient confessions that can be used (before they are retracted) to further the Bush cabal's political agenda and drag the USA further down the path of militant Fascism.

It means slamming the door on real accountability. Forever.

Of course, Bush is never going to take real responsibility for the faulty WMD intelligence because he doesn't really care that the intelligence was wrong! He has already admitted as much:

We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of brutal dictator. It is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in his place.

Can you imagine if Bush & Co had tried that line at the UN back in 2003? "OK, there are no WMDs, and we don't want to seize Iraq's oil, establish new military bases before we get kicked out of Saudi, and destabilize the whole region in an attempt to install puppet regimes that will support our glorious vision of a 21st Century US Empire... we just want to help those poor Iraqi people!" The UN, the US Congress, and the people of the USA would never have supported such madness. Even now, most people in the USA and in Iraq believe the invasion was wrong. And that's without waiting to see whether tomorrow's bogus elections in Iraq produce anything more than a fractured state ruled by mullahs and warlords bent on further bloodshed.

Want more proof that Bush doesn't care that the intelligence on WMDs was wrong? Here's what he recently told NBC anchor Brian Williams about the need to invade Iraq:

Whether or not it needed to happen, I'm still convinced it needed to happen.

In other words, I don't care if my decision was right or not, or whether the facts were real or not, all I care about is myself. I don't care about the truth, only about how I feel.

Fantasy trumps reality. George W. Bush, poster child for the ME Generation.