Another op-ed about Bush Iraq lies

Granted, the St. Petersburg Times has long been more willing to be critical of the Bush Administration than many other papers, but still -- this is pretty damning:

If we learned anything from Vietnam, it is that it's difficult to wage and win a protracted war without public support. Lyndon B. Johnson learned that the hard way; so will George W. Bush. Johnson used a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. vessels in the Tonkin Gulf to ask Congress for a blank check he used to dramatically escalate the war in Vietnam. Bush used the post-9/11 fear of terrorism and slanted intelligence to claim Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened our security.

In both cases, the American people were had.

The growing pessimism about the war in Iraq suggests the public is not buying the upbeat assessments coming out of the Bush-Cheney administration. Americans don't need access to top secret documents to know the war is not the "cakewalk" administration hawks predicted it would be.

Bush may not realize it, but Amnesty International may have done him a big favor. The controversy the human rights group ignited over the treatment of Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has deflected the attention of journalists and war critics from an even more disturbing story - how all the president's talk about going to war as a last resort was just a ruse.

Seven months before the "shock and awe" bombing began in Baghdad, the Bush administration was bending intelligence to suit its purpose, which was to go to war come hell or high water.

Who says so? The head of British foreign intelligence, that's who.

[snip]

Some will ask: What's the point of bringing up the Downing Street memo now, two years after the invasion and at a time when terrorist suicide bombers are making life hell not only for U.S. troops but the Iraqi people? The point is this: President Bush didn't level with the American people before going to war. And he still hasn't.

And I will answer: If it was so important to impeach a president for lying about a blow job, I think lying about threats to this country, playing on the fears of a traumatized population, and conducting an illegal war using illegal means -- and CONTINUING to lie about it, similarly counts as "high crimes and misdemeanors".