January 08, 2003
The Mother Of All Doublethink
And, what do you know? It wasn't even W. himself. Close enough, though. Ari Fleischer was given a good old-fashioned grilling by Helen Thomas during Monday's press "briefing".
Amidst a barrage of questions trying to get to the bottom of the Administration's War Fever, she asked whether the Iraqis had "laid the glove on you or on the United States" in the last 11 years.
Fleischer's response was: "I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein's aggression then. " So that's it, then. We're going to invade Iraq in 2003 -- killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians -- because a few hundred American soldiers were killed in 1990 when the Iraqi military tried feebly to defend itself from the American blitz.
Later in the exchange, Fleischer was perhaps guilty of a Freudian slip when he lamented that, "Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don't think that has been what history has shown." Straight from the horse's mouth: it's the right and responsibility of the President of the United States to "dictate who their dictator is" to the Iraqi population.
Posted by Eddie Tews at January 8, 2003 06:18 PM
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