Bush's lies damage credibility

Sometime earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell related some pretty damning evidence to the Bush administration, which sent our torn nation headlong into a hotly debated war with Iraq.

Pointing to pictures of factories that supposedly made these weapons (with his usual charismatic aura), Powell accused Saddam Hussein of hoarding away weapons of mass destruction ­ weapons that could be used against us.

The trouble is that not once throughout themonth-long war waged in mid-March, has the Bush administration or anyone found any evidence of chemical or biological weapons.

Oh sure, they've claimed to find traces of them and have even reported researching some suspicious materials, but never has a conclusive discovery been made.

So what kind of position does this put the United States in now?

Although our country may have gotten through both enormous scandals and autrocities (Watergate, Hiroshima, etc.) without any major battle scars, it may be safe to assume that Bush's alleged reasoning to go ahead with this war has put him into a pickle ­ a very sour pickle.

Our vulnerable desire for proactive national security in the wake of Sept. 11 does not mean we do not have the potential to be very angry toward our President, who appears so far to have lied to us about the reason for the war.

To find that more than 100 of our men and women, not to mention many more innocent Iraqis, died for a seemingly false cause would be a death blow ­ a blow especially to the families of those who perished in battle.

So the question to ask, then, is whether Bush really did know that there were no weapons to be found, and decided to go to war anyway ­ for profit ­ or, if Bush's advisers were correct in assuming that there were weapons.

Did Bush readily push us into this war by exaggerating Iraq's threat to us?

Because no U.S. leader has seemed as eager to go to war in the first place (except, perhaps President Bush I), the answer to the above question would probably be yes.

Since blaming Bush's advisers would be a waste of time (just look at the almost deadly accuracy with which the American military bombed Iraq), Bush had to have known that it was least likely that we would not find any weapons of mass destruction as he would have liked us to believe.

People argue that we may have bombed the evidence, yet according to weapons inspectors, that would have been impossible, considering the harm it would have done to our troops and Iraqis during the war's onset.

Inspectors also checked out the factories that were essentially the basis of Powell's evidence and said they had nothing to do with biological weapons, according to Joem Sijeholm, an inspector who was interviewed by German television.

But Bush does have one major point in his favor. Prime Minister Tony Blair believed in the cause and even said that Hussein's refusal to give up his weapons led the world to witness this highly broadcasted war.

It is too bad, then, that Blair has to explain to his own reluctant country his support for something that didn't end up resolving the situation it set out to do.

Needless to say, he also has to explain the fact that more British soldiers died than our own.

Perhaps there would have been a chance for the President to save face if he could have just proven the link between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

But of course, he hasn't, and it is most likely that just like the weapons, that connection will never be explained either. (Nor will Hussein's relationship to the events of Sept. 11 likely be proved.)

By now we should have unearthed enough weaponry to blow all major countries off of the map. Instead, all we have now are empty word and emptier promises from a President who has yet to prove himself just once.