Tonight George W. Bush spoke to the nation about the course of the war in Iraq. I frankly cannot see why anyone would believe any utterance that issued from his mouth, but let me address a few of his points.

First, Bush calls Iraq the latest battlefield in the war on terror. One might think that it’s the only battlefield, but sadly, we attacked Iraq before finishing our business in Afghanistan — what had been the nexus of terrorism before Bush’s Iraq adventure. And of course, the Taliban is not finished there, yet. Indeed, Osama Bin Laden is probably still lurking thereabouts.

Second, Bush claims, “We will prevent al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban.” Far from preventing it, we have CAUSED it. Bush and his minions have turned Iraq into a terrorists’ playground, where Americans and Iraqis are being violently killed and maimed every day.

What Bush was not forthright enough to say — but what all Americans are coming to see — is that we are indeed hip deep in a quagmire of his devising. Americans want an honest discussion about a

Let’s be clear: To want to extricate our nation from Bush’s failing adventurism in Iraq is not defeatism. It’s a natural reaction to paying a high price for a foolish and deceit-riddled policy.

Much of the American public supported the U.S. attack on Iraq because the Administration led them to believe that Iraq posed a threat to us by a) aiding and abetting Al Qaeda and b) developing Weapons of Mass Destruction that could be reasonably expected to be deployed against us.

In other words, we were threatened by Iraq and needed to pre-emptively attack to eliminate that threat.

More and more poeple are coming to see that that neither (a) nor (b) were true, and, as the Downing Street Memo shows, these were poorly established and largely irrelevant to the U.S. Administration’s urge to attack Iraq. Furthermore, our attack upon and occupation of Iraq has created a nexus of terrorism where one didn’t exist before.

Now we are being asked to support the war to support democracy in Iraq and so that we don’t “lose” in Iraq. No doubt many people are also concerned about pulling out and having 2,000 Americans die in vain.

Given the recent revelation of the identity of Watergate source Deep Throat, it’s interesting to contemplate the trajectory of the American press since those heady days.

Briefly, rather than exposing Republican dirty tricksters, it appears that the press is being played like violins.

A case in point was a June 18 item headlined “Dean Condemns ‘Anti-Semitic Literature’.” The lead in the article was that Dean was responding to the distribution of material that, among other things, suggested that Israel plotted 9/11 to increase American involvement in the Middle East.

The material was distributed at a June 16 Democratic forum examining the so-called Downing Street Memo, which suggests that President Bush was hell-bent to attack Iraq without adequate legal or intelligence grounds.

So a story about an inquiry into possible misdeeds by Bush becomes a story about the supposed anit-Semitism among Democrats. (I saw nothing in the paper about the forum the day after it was held; the first mention was in the article about anti-Semitic literature, two days later.)

Gee, I wonder who was distributing the material.

Deep Throat, pick up the phone!