When Is Bush Going to Come Clean?

The
recent

disclosure that the latest National Intelligence
Estimate [PDF]concludes
that Iran halted its nuclear weapon program several
years ago, assuming Iran ever had such a program, has
caused consternation among neoconservatives, right-wing
Israeli government officials, and Bush regime ranks.

Members of the right-wing Israeli government have
denounced the NIE finding as contrary to Israel`s
interests. Former Bush regime official John Bolton
accused America`s intelligence agencies with conspiring
to discredit President Bush with politicized
intelligence. According to Bolton, it is US intelligence
agencies, not the neoconservatives, who have their
"own agenda." President Bush has promised to
continue his threats against Iran regardless of the NIE
finding.

The
NIE finding puts Bush on the spot by bringing US
intelligence up to speed with the International Atomic
Energy Agency, whose

director has repeatedly reported, as he did on
December 4, that

"the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing
nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities
in Iran."

Bush
has been trying to work up an attack on Iran based on a
non-existent nuclear weapon program. When asked how he
could be threatening World War III with a nuclear-armed
Iran when US intelligence (and the International Atomic
Energy Agency) cannot find evidence of an Iranian
nuclear weapons program, Bush said that

"nobody told me" about the new finding.[Press
Conference by the Presiden,
December 4, 2007]

Absurd, say intelligence officials. The White House has
known about the finding for six months while Dick Cheney
tried to suppress the NIE finding. Neocon National
Security Advisor Steve Hadley even lied to the press
that the NIE finding was new and that`s why Bush didn`t
know about it.

The
unasked question is: What is the real reason the Bush
Regime is so determined to attack Iran? We now know for
certain that the reason has nothing whatsoever to do
with Iranian nukes any more than the US invasion of Iraq
had to do with Iraqi nukes. What is the real reason that
is driving the Bush Regime to seek to overthrow with
military invasions the only Middle Eastern states that
are not US puppets or dependents?

Until
we have the answer to this question, we cannot know why
the Bush regime wasted two administrations and $1
trillion at the minimum in order to kill and maim
civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush`s insane wars have seen the US dollar plummet in
value, the price of oil skyrocket, American`s soft power
destroyed, and the hardening of opposition to the US
worldwide.

What
has been gained by these extraordinary sacrifices?

How
can the American people and their representatives in the
two parties in Congress tolerate a criminal executive
branch that uses lies and deceit to lead them into
illegal wars for secret reasons?

Surely, no one believes that Bush invaded Iraq because
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or that
Bush and Cheney were working up an attack on Iran
because the executive branch did not know of the
intelligence findings of its own agencies.

The
invasion of Afghanistan also remains unexplained. The
Taliban are not Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11
even in the official version of that event. Bush clearly
did not invade Afghanistan in order to capture Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda, who escaped scot free. The Bin
Laden/Sept. 11 rationale for Bush`s wars has completely
disappeared.

Osama
and 9/11 were never more than public excuses for a
pre-determined agenda.

Why
do the US media and the investigative committees of
Congress have no interest whatsoever in finding the
agenda behind Bush`s wars?

How
can Americans be a free people living under a rule of
law when the president can commit the country to
catastrophic wars on the basis of deception and escape
all accountability?

And Bush has the
chutzpah to call on Iran to "come clean" about
its nuclear program or face diplomatic isolation. When
is Bush going to "come clean" and tell us the
real agenda behind his lies, deceptions, and wars?

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Paul Craig Roberts
[email
him] was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
He is the author of

Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider`s Account of
Policymaking in Washington;
 Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and

Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of


The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice. Click

here for Peter
Brimelow`s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts
about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.