Free American History Revised by Jr. Seymour Morris Page B

Chiefs, “Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war.”
    History books talk about America’s long slide into its morass in Vietnam. This is a gross oversimplification. Deeds speak louder than words. Based on the actual deeds—the precise wording of the executive order specifying withdrawal and its abrupt cancellation by another man—there was a defining moment in our Vietnam involvement: the assassination of a president.

    Only 48 hours after the assassination: “Win!” (LBJ with Lodge, Rusk, McNamara, and Ball)
Sending the President Through the Roof
    America’s other messy war also owed its existence to a certain tipping point. In the aftermath of September 11, George W. Bush unleashed a new policy whereby theU.S. would take the offensive and attack hostile nations preemptively. However, it did not happen right after September 11, but almost two months later. Look carefully at the facts.
    During September, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center towers, nations throughout the world nodded in agreement with Bush’s bellicosity. The president’s powerful statement, “You are with us or you are against us,” did not raise concerns, nor did his more blunt statement about nations harboring terrorists being equivalent to being terrorists. Obviously the United States was fully justified in going after al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the minute Bush announced his intention to go after Iraq, other nations balked. Questions about “weapons of mass destruction” and “chemical warfare” dominated their concern about the legitimacy of Bush’s escalation.
    Unfortunately they never grasped the real tipping point (which Bush never communicated fully). This tipping point lacked the drama of the Twin Towers falling down, and while it dominated the U.S. news for weeks, it was quickly forgotten.
    But the president, the Defense Department, and the Homeland Security Department did not forget the anthrax scare that killed five and caused widespread panic. Nobody could figure out who the culprit was, and to this day the FBI does not know for sure. “There is no greater enemy than the enemy you cannot see,” goes the old military axiom. Informed by the CIA chief about the scale of potential damage from chemical warfare, the CIA’s report “sent the President through the roof.” All of a sudden, weapons of mass destruction—forget low-tech attacks by hijacked planes that could easily be dealt with—became the issue. Iraq was universally recognized to be the number-one hostile country claiming (pretending, it turned out) to possess such weapons. From then on, President Bush ordered nuclear/chemical/biological terrorism to be given top priority. Terrorist groups, he warned delegates at an international conference on terrorism, “are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons….We will not wait for the authors of mass murders to gain the weapons of mass destruction. We act now, because we must fight this dark threat from our age and save generations to come.”
    The turning point in American foreign policy from coalition to unilateralist was not only September 11, 2001, but also the anthrax scare that caused panic in October. One wonders what the French president’s reaction would have been if terrorists had poisoned the Paris water supply. He, too, might have gone through the roof.
    * The only reason MacArthur didn’t get court-martialed like the Pearl Harbor navy commanders was that FDR was so desperate to tell the American public some good news that he twisted the story around and praised MacArthur for gallantry and awarded him the Medal of Honor in 1942. It remains, to this day, the greatest government cover-up of all.
    * It was named the Manhattan Project not because of its size or importance, but rather to throw off spies, since projects normally were named for the geographical location of the head engineering firm. German and Russian spies ran around in circles in New