Bill Gallagher: 'Facing a tough re-election bid, Sad Sack Santorum 'finds'
WMD'

Bill Gallagher, Niagara Falls Reporter

DETROIT -- It just becomes a matter of faith, blind faith. Facts and reason
have no place in discussions about the unending mess in Iraq and the
contrived reasons the Busheviks sold to carry out the invasion. The
desperate defense of the indefensible reached a new, laughable low when Sen.
Rick Santorum declared that, indeed, Saddam Hussein's hidden weapons of
horror have been found.

The sorry Santorum made the desperation discovery as Pennsylvania voters are
readying to send him to the political oblivion he richly deserves. As a
sideshow to the Senate's foolish debate on Iraq war resolutions, Santorum
proudly boasted, "The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in
this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of
mass destruction is, in fact, false. We have found over 500 weapons of mass
destruction and, in fact, have found that there are additional chemical
weapons still in the country."

Santorum sold his scoop as "critically important information that the world
needs to know." It turns out Ricky Boy was describing old shells from the
1980s found in discarded munitions dumps. Santorum forgot to mention that,
at the time, Saddam was our "friend" and Donald Rumsfeld was our special
envoy to Baghdad. Rummy sipped Scotch with Saddam and provided him with
satellite photos of those troublesome Kurds, which Saddam then used to
pinpoint his poison-gas attacks.

Even the Defense Department debunked Santorum's great revelation, one
official saying these "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of he
world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to
war." It is unsettling that reporters hearing Santorum's claims at his news
conference didn't howl in laughter and leave to go have a beer.

Maybe Santorum and his ilk should head to Belleau Wood, France, dig up some
mustard gas remnants from World War I and somehow link them to Saddam. If
they dig long enough, they're sure to find artillery shells from the
Franco-Prussian War. They could use the experience to go after buried
weapons King Faisal and his pal Lawrence of Arabia stashed away near
Baghdad.

David Kay, the former weapons searcher in Iraq, said Santorum's smoking-gun
WMDs would be "less toxic than most things Americans have under their
kitchen sink." In the sheer silliness of Santorum's act and the Republicans'
script on Iraq, the truth exits stage right.

In the Senate debate last week, the GOP soldiers dutifully shouted their
fact-challenged slogans. Many of them echoed the slurs of their chickenhawk
general Karl Rove, who recently fabricated history as he tried to brand the
Democrats for the November elections. Rove -- who successfully dodged the
draft during the Vietnam War -- suggested some leading Democrats who
actually served there were cowards and referred to "that party's old pattern
of cutting and running."

During the faux debate on Iraq, several Republicans waved the bloody flag of
Vietnam, vowing not to permit a repeat of the ignominious scene of the fall
of Saigon and Americans scrambling to get out of there. Not a single
lawmaker who used that ridiculous argument mentioned that Republican Gerald
Ford was president in 1975 when the commies took over there and the exit
from Vietnam was a GOP enterprise.

We now know thousands of Americans died in Vietnam after the loathsome Henry
Kissinger had already made a secret deal with the Chinese to accept a
Communist government in Vietnam. That was in 1972.

From 1969 to 1977, Kissinger served under presidents Nixon and Ford as
national security adviser and secretary of state. He held both posts for
several years. Last month, the National Archives released a collection of
Kissinger's papers from those years, honoring a declassification request
from George Washington University.

The papers included memoranda and Kissinger's secret conversations. They
show the U.S. government had a clear, private willingness to accept a
Communist Vietnam, while publicly opposing such a resolution and while
American soldiers were dying to prevent it.

In one conversation, Kissinger told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, "If we can
live with a Communist government in China, we ought to accept it in
Indochina."

As many historians long suspected, the papers buttress the "decent interval"
theory. Kissinger and his Republican bosses were planning on "cutting and
running" in Vietnam, but they wanted it to happen long enough after U.S.
troops departed to save face.

We're witnessing the same kind of cynicism and duplicity in the Busheviks'
approach in Iraq. They publicly denounce a timetable for troop withdrawal,
while privately planning to do just that. The New York Times reports that
the top U.S. commander in Iraq has already drafted a plan for a significant
reduction of troop strength by the end of 2007. The first sharp cuts will
come in September, just in time for the fall election campaign.

The plan hinges on "progress" in Iraq, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the
U.S. commander, is supposed to work out the troop reduction after consulting
with the new Iraqi government and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The bloody reality in Iraq will have nothing to do with the timetable for
troop withdrawal, nor will our puppet government there. The only
consideration in the decision will be the impact on the Busheviks' desperate
maneuvers to maintain full control on Capitol Hill.

"We're winning in Iraq and our troops are coming home" will be the battle
cry. Toss in a few fall terror alerts, a taped message from bin Laden, and
there you have it. Lies and fear win. Truth and democracy lose.

So far, Bush's war in Iraq has cost American taxpayers $400 billion, or
about $100,000 per minute. The human toll of the war of choice is
staggering. The Los Angeles Times reports that at least 50,000 Iraqis have
died violently since the 2003 invasion.

The Busheviks still lie and link the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 attacks
that killed 3,000 people. As terrible as that day was, it hardly compares to
the bloodshed in Iraq.

Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. invasion, once callously quipped, "We
don't do body counts." Last year, after much prodding, Bush finally admitted
that "30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion
and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."

The Los Angeles Times extrapolated a chilling number from statistics of
50,000 dead from the Baghdad morgue and Iraqi Health Ministry:
"Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed
nationwide in the last three years." Deaths built on lies.

The PBS Frontline documentary "The Dark Side," about Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld's manipulation and suppression of intelligence to make the case for
war with Iraq, is an extraordinary and riveting work. Producer Michael
Kirk's film provides a chilling account of how Cheney and Rumsfeld set out
to emasculate the CIA, ignore Secretary of State Colin Powell and create
their own intelligence network to churn out reports that matched their
conclusions.

"The Dark Side" presents former CIA director George Tenet as a man who
wanted to please the boss, was willing to compromise his own integrity and
left the agency in shambles. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tenet refused to be
interviewed, but more than 40 others who participated or saw firsthand the
dirty deeds done did interviews.

"The Dark Side" is brilliantly produced and the compression into 90 minutes
of three years of deliberate lies and deceptions leaves the viewer numb. No
rational person can view the film and not conclude that the public reasons
for invading Iraq were concocted.

Come September, when the troop withdrawals are underway and the mainstream
media shows the joyful homecomings, some brave high school civics or history
teachers will show the class "The Dark Side." The Busheviks will squeal like
stuck pigs. Boards of education in red states will ban the film.

Like Col. Jessup, Jack Nicholson's character in the film "A Few Good Men,"
those who try to keep the lies of Iraq alive will bellow to America's young,
"You can't handle the truth."

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city
councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is
gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net.

Source: Niagara Falls Reporter
http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher269.html

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson