Did Bush lie to justify invading Iraq for bad reasons?

Great Debates
1

I asserted in the Tony Snow Pit thread that Bush’s government “deliberately manipulated facts in order to justify declaring specious but ruinous invasions of countries whose policies they opposed in a misguided attempt to restore national pride and other imperialistic reasons.” (Actually I just asserted that they manipulated facts in order to invade one country, but the snip above refers to two imperialist states, Bush’s U.S. and Hitler’s Germany, hence “countries.” There is no need to discuss the comparison between the two states here, in that would be a messy hijack of an already complicated discussion. Feel free to Godwinize some other thread, though, and I’ll gladly participate there when you do.) I’m not sure that this is conducive to a very interesting debate, but that Pit thread wasn’t about this subject, and I am a little surprised that this is in much dispute. But I’m starting this GD thread to learn why **Fuji ** thinks there is much to debate about here.

I’ll start by asserting some facts that I have no doubts about, and would request that they be stipulated as givens: the U.S. invasion of Iraq was causally connected to the 9/11 attack on the U.S. that preceded it, that (at least so far as the Bush administration tried successfully, for a long time, to package it this way) U.S. morale was badly shaken as a result of the 9/11 attacks, that Bush in so spinning it made a huge appeal to patriotism, that his administration misled Congress, the public, and the international community repeatedly and deliberately in regard to Iraqi belligerence (and preparedness to wage an offensive war) during the build-up to the war, and that neo-cons within the Bush administration had been arguing prior to 9/11 that the US should foment regime change in Iraq. Are these all stipulated, or do we need to argue them before we get started? If so, please select one to argue first.

Link: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9998592#post9998592

2

I’d just recommend everyone hie over to pbs.org and watch the various episodes of Frontline that analyze the Iraq war.

3

Is the con side of this argument that Bush lied to justify invading Iraq for good reasons?

4

Hasn’t this been debated to death?
It all comes down to what you define “lie” as. If cherry-picking intelligence to support your cause, and ignoring valid arguments against you is “lying”, then clearly the answer is yes, if not the answer is probably no.

5

The fallback debate topic is “Is the Costanza Defense (it’s not a lie if you believe it) valid?”

6

Yes

At the time of that attack, yes. By Oct 2002? What’s your supporting evidence?

Not really. And certainly not in the way that Hitler did (because that is the way this is going). He said Iraq was a threat not only to the US, but to “the region” (meaning the M.E.).

Congress let itself be misled.

Polls from just before the AUMF vote showed the public didn’t believe much of what Bush was saying. Link.

The “international community” was even more skeptical than Americans.

Probably.

It was official US policy, set in place during the Clinton presidency, to support regime change in Iraq. The so-called neo-cons were not alone in this.

I’m not buying into your givens.

7

That was a poorly worded title. It would have been better to say: Did Bush lie to justify invading Iraq for reasons similar to the ones Hitler had for starting WWII?

8

Bush never did claim that a force of Iraqi troops had attacked a US radio station, so No. Unless you count the TV transmitters on top of the north tower of the WTC.

One topic we have never debated here, because it has never been responded to when asked, is “Are the justifications for preemptive war that Bush offered for invading Iraq different from those Tojo offered for attacking Pearl Harbor?”

9

I’m very surprised.

10

I’d rather not get into the whole Hitler comparison. I’m conceding that Hitler was far more deviant, far more genocidal, far more fixated on pure hatred, etc. than Bush could ever imagine being. I was challenged to defend my thesis, which I thought pretty much beyond dispute: Bush told various whoppers in order to manipulate us into a war to make us feel about good about ourselves and basically to flex his muscles on the world stage, doing all sorts of imperialist stuff like changing the leaders of other countries, securing better access to oil resources, (??), and so on. I’m waiting for **Fuji ** to show up and explain what about that thesis he disputes.

It was a poorly worded title, though.

11

Yeah, he lied. I don’t think he planned to lie to the public in the dead of night, rubbing his hands in the Oval Office while gleefully chuckling at his master plan.

For what it’s worth, and this is just my impression, I think this is how it went down.

Bush was not and is not the smartest apple on the tree at the best of times, and he probably had some idea of how far in above his head he’d gotten after 9/11. He couldn’t find Osama, the public was clamoring, and he really, really wanted to believe that we had good reason for invading Iraq. It is very hard not to believe something that you really want to believe in, and so when he got vague intelligence with questionable basis, he tweaked it and spun it and maybe got some justification and kudos from someone with a vested interest in invading Iraq whom he trusted. I don’t know about that last, really. I’m just spitballing. But let’s just say that it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. He took half-truths and rorshachs and he squinted and squinted until he saw what he wanted to see, and then he presented it to Congress and the American people.

It’s sort of like the kid who really wants to believe he didn’t cheat on that spelling test even though he was caught with a crib sheet, and he would have gotten an A anyway, so he kind of fools himself into thinking that he didn’t cheat with a series of maybe’s. But yeah, the kid’s lying, and Bush did too.

I don’t think Bush is an evil genius or Hitler. I think he’s a fuck-up. I think he’s exactly what he appears to be: a spoiled rich kid who’s skated his whole life, 'cause Daddy’s gonna pick up the pieces and make it OK again, except he got in too deep for that, tried to wing it, and fucked it up even more. There never really was a master plan, or if there were, it was so out there that the first dose of reality brought it crashing down.

I think Bush’s stupidity and his short-sightedness and his lies have cost us the lives of 3,000+ good men and thousands more innocent civilians who should be alive today. And that’s what pisses me off the most. In a way, I find myself wishing that Bush were an evil genius. At least those people would have died for some kind of purpose, as awful as it might be. But no, they died because of one man’s idiocy, and if there’s anything more pointlessly existential than that, I have yet to run into it.

12

I think it’s a substantial oversimplification to say that the Bushies knew there was no reason to invade, but decided to fabricate a story and mislead everyone so that they could have a war. They did, as has been mentioned, choose which pieces of information they wanted to believe and played them up as much as possible, and willfully ignored or discounted information that went against their beliefs.

Fundamentally, I think they saw this as a chance to remove Saddam and create an Arab democracy in the Middle East that would be pro-US. If they had been successful, they would have been able to remove US forces from Saudi Arabia, the presence of which was the original bin Laden motivation for jihad against the US. The Bush administration vision was that democracies would spring forth across the region, oil supplies would be stable, and all would be happy in the world.

To do that, they decided they had to bring out the scare tactics - 9/11, WMDs, etc. I don’t believe Iraq was simply to raise national morale. That would have been much more easily done by capturing bin Laden, which they completely gave up on in their zeal to invade Iraq.

I’m no supporter of the Bush/Cheney cabal, but I don’t think they out-and-out lied. I do think they heard what they wanted to hear, ignored and attacked what they didn’t, and played up any rumors that they could find so that they could do what they wanted to do. Call them liars if it makes you feel better, but my guess is that the most that will be found by historians is that they simply filtered out any contrary positions and greatly magnified those that they believed. It might be a fine line, but I wouldn’t put it in the category of lying.

13

Possible reasons Bush promoted the Iraq invasion, from most well-intentioned to most culpable:[ul][li]Bush quixotically believed that bringing democracy to the Middle East was simply a matter of overthrowing dictators, and the new democracies would be peaceful and moderate. []Bush thought that the war(s) would work like a latter-day World War Two, restoring American patriotism, strategic importance, and economic competitiveness.[]The “system” needed a long-term ideological and strategic enemy to replace the Soviet Union, and radical Islam seemed to fit the bill. The aim of the war was to establish a neo-colonial system of protectorates who would keep the oil flowing to the West, and incidentally reward the corporate interests who supported the Bush administration with hundreds of billions of dollars of profit.[/ul][/li]
Or any mix and match of the above. Or all at once.

14

It’s over 4,000 now.
http://icasualties.org/oif/

15

Yeah, I guess I haven’t been following the casualty reports lately.

16

Okay, your first bullet-point suggests that he’s colossally stupid, and that all his advisors are stupider than he is. Possible, I suppose, but extremely unlikely.

#2 is pretty evil–even assuming such a plan made sense, it translates into “he declared war on a country purely for the benefits that war would bring his country.” Entirely possible, but as malign a motive as you’ll find this side of a crazy dictator.

#3 assumes a state of permanent war needs to exist, and that Bush knew this going in, and has had no reason to change his mind on this subject.

#4–pure imperialism.

17

You dismiss #1 far too quickly. prr… That was indeed pretty much the fairy tale Wolfowitz got Bush to believe in, and it’s what was the guiding approach for the first few years of the occupation (of those areas that were, in fact, occupied). Even today, Bush still answers questions by claiming that overthrowing Saddam was the right thing to do, period.

squink, linty, it’s sophistry to list only US casualties or even “Coalition of the Willing” casualties. Each of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths should matter just as much. The millions of lives ruined there matter as much as the thousands more ruined here.

18

I’m not at all convinced that Bush ever actually believed it, so much as it was a good story, had characters he could relate to, was easy to memorize, was Reaganesque in its simple-minded patriotism, and so on. Did he really think that was the real deal? I think Bush is a really, really dumb piece of amoral shit, but I think even he has more sense than that, and if he doesn’t, his advisors understand the basics of how foreign policy works, even if they want their own selfish short-terms goals met more…like I said, it’s possible, but you’ve got to presume an unprecedented amount of sheer, brain-addled dumbth here.

19

Is there any proof that Bush lied?

Or is this all just supposition?

20

Done many threads on this very subject over a period of years. Bottom line: If you’re determined not to see it, you won’t.

prr, since you bring it up, I do think Bush’s “reasoning” was on a pretty primal level - “Fuck Saddam. I’m taking him out” was widely quoted. My own suspicion is that his #1 reason lay in his own self-image of machismo, built in contrast to his own image of his namby-pamby father who wasn’t man enough to finish the job on his own watch. Maybe that’s unfair, but the absolute lack of any coherent statement from him describing his own reasoning in any further depth than that leaves little doubt to credit him with. I also think he, and the entire cabal for that matter, not excepting a majority of Congress in the AUMF vote, thought the war would be wrapped up quickly and that whatever resulted would look enough like something that could be called “victory” that it wouldn’t matter. That has, after all, been the pattern in our previous dubious military ventures historically. But “no one could have foreseen” that it would be fucked up so badly that nothing that could be called “victory” was even attainable.

I do agree he has to know that most of what he’s offered has been post-hoc rationalizing, but really, what else can a man of his adolescent temperament and low sense of accountability say or do? There could *still * be a pony, any day now, right?