Laura Bush: Gerhard Schröder to blame for Iraq War

I would have expected Laura Bush's new memoir Spoken from the Heart to be a full-throated defense of her husbands failed presidency.  But I have to admit I didn't expect she would try to deflect blame for the disastrous invasion of Iraq in pursuit of fictitious WMDs onto one of the fiercest critics of Bush's war dreams: 

The usually charitable Mrs. Bush chastises the Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for their “nasty personal criticisms of George,” and she writes that she has often wondered if Jacques Chirac of France or Gerhard Schröder of Germany “could have done more” to prevent the Iraq war, “if one of them could have persuaded Saddam to go into exile, if they could have conveyed that the United States was not bluffing.”

So Schröder, who, along with Joschka ("I am not convinced") Fischer, warned that invading Iraq would be a huge strategic mistake, are to blame for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld folly that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and cost US taxpayers and their grandchildren (up to now) $750 billion. 

Is this another example of the "epistemic closure" - ie stupid thinking - that characterizes "conservative thinking" in the US today?

Elsewhere in the book - which I am not likely to read - Mrs Bush has delusional fantasies that she and her husband were "poisoned" in Germany:

 

In ihren Memoiren „Spoken From the Heart“ (übersetzt: Aus dem Herzen gesprochen) berichtet die ehemalige First Lady, wie sie beide und ein Teil des mitreisenden Mitarbeiterstabes beim G-8-Gipfel in Heiligendamm plötzlich erkrankten und das Bett hüten mussten.

Ärzte und Geheimdienst hätten damals untersucht, ob es sich um eine Vergiftung handelte, eine endgültige Schlussfolgerung sei jedoch nicht gezogen worden, berichtete der US-Sender CNN.

(In her memoir the former first lady writes about how both of them along with other staff members suddently got ill during the G-8 Summit in Heliigendamm and were bedridden.
Doctors and Secret Service investigated the possibility that this was a case of poisoning, however the results were inconclusive....)

 

 

Perhaps the biological WMDs were not in Iraq after all, but rather in Heiligendamm?

 

 

Comments

[hattie]

She's a weird one.

[50 Geburtstag]

Vielen Dank für die Information ....