With a nod to questions as to why Iraq is any more dangerous than any of her sisters on the axis of evil, Bush said that "different threats require different strategies." The U.S. is seeking revolution from within Iran. In North Korea (cut to: a very skeptical looking Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has all but called Bush a pussy on his handling of this crisis), the U.S. is working with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia to find a peaceful solution.

And lest we have an Arabic Kim Jong Il someday, action, Bush said, is needed in Iraq.

Bush then spelled out the threat. "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option," he said. Indeed, Hussein and his minions have attacked Iraq's own citizens, tortured the children of those he wanted to give up information, tortured folk by dripping acid on skin, with electric shock, hot irons, cutting out tongues and rape.

Answering those who found the born-again president's hyperbolic depiction of his enemies a bit much, Bush commented, "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."

Interestingly, though the administration has scared the masses in the past with talk of a nuke-happy Hussein -- in his September 2002 address to the U.N., Bush spelled out some of the same evidence he presented tonight, saying that the "first time we may be completely certain he has nuclear weapons is when, God forbid, he uses one" -- tonight Bush backed off that a bit. No doubt this decision was made in light of Monday's report by Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who stated that his organization had "found no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapon program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s."

But the international types had also brought good news to the administration hawks; that same day, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix -- whom Bushies had previously regarded as sort of a Norwegian Dr. Phil -- slammed Iraq for not having accepted "the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and live in peace." Blix also noted that despite Iraq's protests to the contrary, inspectors had found "indications" that Iraq had biological weapons containing VX, a deadly nerve agent.

But Bush went into much greater, dramatic detail: U.N. arms inspectors concluded that Hussein had the ingredients to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax, more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agents, and more than 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Hussein hasn't accounted for these, and "inspectors recently turned up 16 of [the 30,000 munitions], despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence."

And on and on -- mobile biological weapons labs, attempts to purchase uranium from Africa, Iraqi security personnel hiding information and materials, U.N. U-2 surveillance flights blocked, scientists prevented from speaking to inspectors, their families threatened.

"The dictator of Iraq is not disarming," Bush said. "To the contrary, he is deceiving."

Pre-Sept. 11, Bush said, such things might be tolerated. But in the New Normal, apathy isn't an option. "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," he said.

(Bush was only repeating here what the Iraqis themselves have said, according to press reports. According to a Kuwaiti newspaper story from last summer, in a June 2002 meeting among Hussein, his two sons and other members of his inner circle of advisors, Ali Hasan al-Majid, a Saddam cousin who possesses a diabolical expertise in chemical warfare, asked "has the time not come to take the fight to their own homes in America? They wanted this to be a war on all fronts, so let it be a war on all fronts and using all weapons and means." Another referred to Iraqis becoming "human bombs in the thousands, willing to blow up America in particular," and yet another suggested that "If bin Laden truly did carry out the September attacks as they claim, then as Allah is my witness, we will prove to them that what happened in September is a picnic compared to the wrath of Saddam Hussein.")

Thus, promised Bush -- though he didn't address the concern that attacking Iraq might exacerbate, rather than reduce, the chance of Iraqi retaliation -- "We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes."

A day that will definitely come, however, is Feb. 5, when the U.S. will ask the U.N. Security Council to move on all this.

And with that, Bush thanked the country and God, shook the hands of the old fat white men behind him, and went home to, presumably, sleep soundly.

I'm glad someone is.

Recent Stories