Salt Lake Tribune - Bush catapults propaganda in U.S., Iraq - by Molly Ivans

Salt Lake Tribune Bush catapults propaganda in U.S., Iraq by Molly Ivans

''Catapulting the propaganda'' would explain Bush his performance at a press meeting when he appeared surrounded by babies born from frozen embryos. Bush used the phrase ''culture of life'' at least 27 dozen times. ''The use of federal dollars to destroy life is something I simply do not support,'' Bush said to the press the following day. Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, federal dollars are being used to destroy life at a pretty good clip because Bush decided to wage an entirely elective war against a country that presented little or no threat to the world. And according to the Downing Street memo, he damn well knew it, too. The destruction of life in Iraq is more dramatic than taking a blastocyst smaller than a pinpoint out of a petri dish. The 1,600 American dead so far - not much culture of life there. The 15,000 wounded, many of them irreparably - not so good there, either. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths are all over the lot - a British medical journal claimed 100,000 last year, the Iraq Body Count Web site says between 21,000 and 25,000. The U.S./U.N. sanctions are widely believed to have killed hundreds of thousands, most of them babies, even after the Oil for Food Program was instituted.