Hurricane George

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Thursday, September 18 2003, 8:48AM

With a hurricane blowing in town, it's fitting that Washington, D.C. is closing down today. But the next new storm brewing by the Atlantic is not from Isabel. It's from Hurricane George, which has been blowing hot air for months. Now that disaster is about to hit land too.

It was hardly a profile in courage. President Bush flew to Camp David last night to flee the coming hurricane. Congress also left town, but "most of the everyday people left in the nation's capital were told to stay home," the Associated Press reported.

Washington's subway and bus systems are closing down too. Today is not a good day to do business with the U.S. government. In fact, the past two years have been hell.

Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said this week that the U.S. and British governments acted with less integrity in the Iraq war than refrigerator salesmen. "We know that the advertisers will advertise a refrigerator in terms they do not quite believe in but you expect governments to be more serious and have more credibility," he said.

Blix also compared the U.S. claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the witch trials of history's ignoble past. When you decide that something exists, he said, you tend to make up facts to bolster your belief. "In the Middle Ages, people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them," Blix said.

Saddam Hussein may not have worn a pointy hat or flown on a broom, but he clearly became America's modern day witch. Certainly, he was a brutal dictator, but there are a lot of brutal dictators out there that the United States isn't rushing to remove from power. And many of them, like Hussein, honed their brutality for years with the support of the U.S. government.

For all the talk of military intelligence, Bush and his British counterpart Tony Blair have insulted our intelligence for a full year now with their trumped up claims of Saddam Hussein's imminent threat. Now the whole house of cards is tumbling down on them, and even respected leaders like former Senator Max Cleland have begun to compare the Iraq war to Vietnam.

The quick success of the military operation proves that Hussein was never a real threat to the U.S. The absence of weapons of mass destruction undercuts one of the other chief reasons for the invasion. And now George Bush has finally admitted that Iraq had no connection with the September 11 attacks.

Contradicting misleading statements made on Sunday by Vice President Cheney, Bush yesterday admitted, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11."

Let me get this straight. Hussein was no military threat, he had no weapons of mass destruction, and he wasn't connected to September 11 after all? Those were the only three reasons the Administration gave to explain its rush to war. Now that they're all gone, can somebody please explain why we went to war?

Uh oh, we've got a hurricane coming in. Time to get out of town.

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