Sunday brunch at Quiner’s Diner

By Tom Quiner

Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon.

Fried zucchini. Beet greens cooked up with bacon. Lemon kale salad.

Coffee. Juice.

What a lovely brunch this morning prepared by my lovely wife. A family member was present, and as often happens at Quiner’s Diner, the talk turned political.

This family member is on a much different wavelength than I. Don’t ask how, but somehow the conversation veered from The Donald and Hillary to Iran and Iraq and how evil America screwed up the Middle East.

Our guest asserted that the only reason we went into Iraq was to seize their oil. ‘Wolfowitz’ (whose name our guest invoked in a manner that suggested he likes Hitler a little better Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush II) said Iraq is going to pay for this war with their oil (sounds a little like Trump!).

“Except that we didn’t take it. We left,” I said.

Nope, he responded triumphantly, we only went in for the oil, because there were:

NO. WEAPONS. OF. MASS. DESTRUCTION.

That was simply a ruse.

End of story. Right?

You’ve heard the lie a thousand times from liberals:

“Bush lied and people died.”

It’s not true, as this blog has written here and here.

Now the New York Times, one of George W. Bush’s staunchest critics, acknowledges that Bush did NOT lie regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

They wrote a 10,000 word, 8-part story on they subject a couple of years ago.

Excerpts:

“In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Jarrod Lampier was there. The recently retired Army major witnessed the discovery of some 2400 nerve-agent rockets which were unearthed at a former Republican Guard compound:

“Troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. ‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say.’

The Times belatedly reports that …

“Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of ‘wounds that never happened’ from ‘that stuff that didn’t exist.’ The public, he said, was misled for a decade. ‘I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ he said. ‘There were plenty.’”

The Times reported that Wikileaks revelations in 2010 built on the growing realization that Bush was right:

“By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). … Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.”

Any political detractor of Mr. Bush with a smattering of character should step forward and apologize profusely for smearing a good man, including Hillary Clinton AND Donald Trump.

Sadly, they haven’t.

Perhaps they’re too busy covering for the current occupant of the White House who legitimately lacks even a smattering of that rich substance that oozes from Mr. Bush, that substance upon which leadership hinges, known as character.

I was tempted to lean over to my guest and ask him to wipe the egg off his face.