George W. Bush’s Shocking BBC Interview: Did He Just Say That?

February 15, 2008

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Last night, or if you are going by United States time zones, early this morning, George W. Bush sat down with the BBC in his first interview with the network in close to seven years and boy oh boy it did not disappoint. I am unsure of what George Bush was thinking going into this, come to think of it, he probably wasn’t. Take a gander at some of these answers Bush chose to give that could be interpreted as an admission of knowingly invading a stable Iraq. Here are a couple highlights from the monumental chat between Bush and BBC World News America presenter Matt Frei, the entire transcript can be found here:

Matt Frei: Mr President, thanks for joining us. You’re famous for saying that you don’t believe in opinion polls.

President George W Bush: Yeah!

Frei: The Chinese government has been saying - part in response to this that - “America is [slipping back into] Cold War thinking.”

Mr Bush: Yeah. Well, you know, they’re… I think that’s just a brush back pitch, as we say in baseball. It’s… America is trapped in this notion that we care about human life. We respect human dignity. And that’s not a trap. That’s a belief. And that many of [us] in this country recognize that the human condition matters to our own national security.

Frei: The Senate yesterday passed a bill outlawing water-boarding. You, I believe, have said that you will veto that bill.

Mr Bush: That’s not -

Frei: Does that not send the wrong signal… Mr Bush: No, look… that’s not the reason I’m vetoing the bill. The reason I’m vetoing the bill - first of all, we have said that whatever we do… will be legal. Secondly, they are imposing a set of standards on our intelligence communities in terms of interrogating prisoners that our people will think will be ineffective.

Frei: Can you honestly say, Mr President, that today America still occupies the moral high ground?

Mr Bush: Absolutely - absolutely. We believe in human rights and human dignity. We believe in the human condition. We believe in freedom….And I [firmly] believe that we are laying the foundation for peace. People have written off the Middle East. It’s impossible to change the conditions there. Let’s just ignore it. Or let’s promote stability, which was part of the foreign policy of the past. I chose a different course. Stability didn’t work. Stability created the conditions that were right for these terrorists to emerge and recruit.

Now I am far from a conspiracy theorist, I actually find the quite revolting, and I really don’t expect anything major to come from this interview, that is painfully obvious when you look at everything else the guy has done and remained unscathed. That being said, I do think it is fair to bring up one, shocking and disturbing statement Bush made in the course of the interview referenced above. As you can see in the last section of transcript above George W. Bush admits that he was not concerned about “Stability” in the Middle-East when attacking Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, “Stability didn’t work, stability created the conditions for the terrorists to emerge and recruit.” Now, this is just one way you could look inside this statement; when he admits that a “stable” middle east, in his opinion, didn’t work, then his decision to invade the country could be viewed as a blatant attempt to create a instable middle east, thus one could conclude that the president “intended” to create “instability.” Now I fully understand that Bush did not, quote on quote, indict himself in the conventional sense, however he did admit that he decided to invade a “stable” region, with the personal beliefs that “stability” was no longer effective there, thus causing “instability.” Take it for what it’s worth, I say that in the sense that not much more could be revealed about this guy that could make him come across worse then he already does. And if this interview did anything, it was further enforce the belief that George W. Bush and his administration went into Iraq for reasons other then those which were given to us. And I think anyone who has a fuzzy memory of the lead-up to this war should really take a minute and watch the clip below.