There are times, Mr. Bush, when a leader must surrender his personal destiny to the greater, principled course of a nation's history. The United States is now faced with an international crisis entirely of your design. You proposed an invasion of a country of which Colin Powell, your own Secretary of State, in 2001, had said this of their military capability:
...the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction..... And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq...
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And as a result of that invasion, we have now lost nearly three thousand soldiers. Iraq, a sovereign nation, has been split asunder, and is now engaged in full civil war. Though the exact numbers cannot be known, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives as well. Children now lay maimed in understaffed hospitals. Families are shattered. In Iraq, the dead fill the streets:
A series of car bombs killed 160 people in a Shi'ite stronghold in Baghdad on Thursday in the bloodiest single attack since the U.S. invasion of 2003.
As political leaders scrambled in public to hold Iraqis back from all-out sectarian civil war, they imposed an indefinite curfew on the capital. Police said the six coordinated blasts in the Sadr City slum wounded 257 people, many maimed for life....
In Sadr city, six parked vehicles packed with explosives caused carnage in streets and a market, a police general told state television. Mortars also landed and residents seized a seventh car they said was driven by a would-be suicide bomber.
"As the bombs went off, everyone started running and shouting," news photographer Kareem al-Rubaie said. "I saw a car from a wedding party, covered in ribbons and flowers. It was burning. There were pools of blood ... and children dead.
And they float down the Tigris:
There are volunteers of local Iraqi men who line the river bank in Kadhimiya; they are volunteers on the lookout for the bodies that float downstream and sometimes get caught in the reeds. One man, 18-year-old Ali Ghanem, has been doing this every day since last winter. He's said to be the best swimmer of the group.
Recently, he pulled out eight bodies. A day before that, it was 11. He says he's used to it now. Sometimes he pulls the bodies by their clothes, or from the hands. He says he's now used to the smell.
Many of the bodies have been tortured. Ahmed Hussein lost his nephew, who was kidnapped along with two of his friends not too long ago. He says their bodies turned up later in the river.
"You cannot imagine the way they were tortured. I haven't seen anything like it," Hussein said. "They used to say Saddam executes people and grinds their bodies up, but it is nothing compared to this. It's so horrible."
and still the morgues are filled to the brim:
With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.
Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.
In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.
The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says
Congress is now in the hands of the Democrats, and there will be investigations and subpoenas and you and your administration will testify under oath. But this time, Mr. President, you will not be permitted to testify with Mr. Cheney by your side. This time, Mr. President, there will be transcripts made of your exact statements. And this time, for perhaps the first time in your life, you will be held accountable for your statements. Because of the extraordinary level of corruption you have tolerated, and the unprecedented level of dishonesty you have personally engaged in, impeachment is likely inevitable.
Investigations take time. No doubt, you and your legal advisors are planning on using executive privilege to run the clock out on the investigations and hope that by the time the courts are done forcing you to turn over whatever documents you didn't shred, your term in office will be coming to an end, pardons for your entire staff will be the order of the day and you won't have to face inevitable justice. It's all well and good for you to take action to avoid allowing staffers to be convicted and serve prison time on behalf of your administration's policies, but neither the United States, nor beleaguered Iraq can sustain two more years of your presidency. You say, Mr. Bush, that you will not withdraw the troops. So how many more American soliders and Iraqi civilians must die before a new American president redeploys our troops? What right do you have to their life so that you can save face?
That is the heart of my argument. You are not a man who can apologize without smirking and winking, nor will you change course in Iraq. You say that as long as Barney, your dog, and Laura, your wife, are still on your side, you will stay the course in Iraq. What kind of an adult justifies the destruction of both our military families and of Iraqi families, by the unwavering love of a dog and the commitment of a wife? The triviality of that sentiment reveals that "stay the course" really means "protect George from the confronting the horrific reality of his action".
In December of 1998, President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox - four days of intense bombing designed to destroy whatever remaining cache of weapons Hussein still possessed. In April of 2001, your own Secretary of State, who in 2000 had joined you on the campaign trail to state with authority that the then-current president had allowed the military's readiness to disintegrate, claimed that sanctions had worked and that Hussein could not "project conventional force against his neighbors". Mr. Bush, if Hussein did not present a significant threat to his neighbors, how could he present a threat to us - a nation across oceans and seas and gulfs with the mightiest military in the history of the world? And in 2003, as the ramp up to the war signaled your determination, the inspectors on the ground asked for more time to complete their process - confident that with adequate time, they could finish the job of disarming Hussein and save the nation from war. But you did not allow them to finish the job. You, Mr. Bush, forced the UN inspectors to leave. Should we assume that a certifiably disarmed Iraq did not suit your purposes?
What I think, Mr. Bush, is that you invaded Iraq confident that they did not have the means to respond. Your refusal to provide the 400,000 troops the Pentagon estimated were necessary for stabilization was rooted in your knowledge that there was no means for that nation to respond to our action. Twelve years before our military had easily rolled their military back within the confines of their own state. Since that time, they had undergone 12 years of sanctions, a rigid weapon inspection process with the destruction of whatever WMD were found, and four days of bombing intended to bring Iraq roughly into compliance with UN demands. Your own CIA warned you against including the Niger allegations in your State Of The Union speech, and your Energy Department told you the aluminum tubes which had been uncovered were not suitable for use with a nuclear facility. Yet you and your administration spoke ominously of smoking guns and mushroom clouds and mislead the American public into supporting your ill-conceived and slovenly-executed war.
There are probably numerous charges on which you can be impeached - from your willful ignorance of the many warnings you received of an impending attack and your refusal to take even a single action to protect the safety of the American public, to your execution of the war in Afghanistan and now Iraq, to your administration's outing of a covert CIA operative who had been appointed by your CIA to head a group tasked with ascertaining the truth of Hussein's weapons capabilities. But as you know, impeachment takes time and Iraq does not have time. Too many of our young men and women do not have time either. And it is not just that even one more American soldier, or Iraqi civilian die while you remain in the White House.
When you step down, which you inevitably will, do not offer up excuses for your actions. Do not claim that you were acting with concern for the well-being of the American public and with goodwill towards the citizens of Iraq. Your lies, covered by tatters even now, will be exposed for what they are and make harsher the inevitable historical assessment. Simply apologize for your rhetoric, for your willful ignorance of the facts, and for your hubris and leave office. Appoint someone that both parties find tolerable, and allow that person to change course Iraq. And allow all of us to begin the process of healing from the enormous damage you have done.