The clip you posted from Fox News sure didn’t do him any favors. I’ve never thought he was that great, and his latest books make it pretty clear that for whatever reason, he doesn’t like Obama, but I never thought he was an idiot until that clip. Now, I’m not so sure.
I don’t know if he’s stupid, senile, or biased, and I don’t care, but he’s clearly wrong. About the invasion, I suspect he’s making the same mistake most people do, and is looking at the time period between 9-11 and the October 2002 vote in Congress, a period when nobody knew what was going on in Iraq, and honest mistakes were easy to make. About Obama not leaving 10,000 troops in Iraq, I don’t know WTF he’s thinking. Even the totally-in-the-tank Chris Wallace had just told him that leaving ANY troops required the consent of the Iraqi government, and we didn’t have it. Bush tried and failed to negotiate it before he left office; Obama tried and failed after he entered office. The Iraqi government simply didn’t want a US military presence in Iraq any more, after we had killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as collateral damage to Bush’s vendetta against one man, and we couldn’t stay there without making a mockery of our avowed intention to give the Iraqi people the freedom to choose their own destiny.
Maybe the clip doesn’t do him justice, but it’s all you gave me. For Woodward to act as if Obama could have left 10,000 troops in Iraq if he had wanted to, with no trouble at all, is indeed idiocy.
But your main point is whether Bush lied, and the answer is Yes, Bush and his cadre lied. I’m pretty sure I’ve been through this with you before, but I’m happy to do it again:
- I give everybody – Bush, Cheney, Hillary, everybody – a pass for anything they said about Saddam and WMDs before about January of 2003. We hadn’t had any good intelligence about it since Clinton pulled the UN inspectors out in 1998, and if you’re responsible for national security, you have to err on the side of caution. We knew Saddam had chemical weapons in the 80’s, we knew he was a monster, so it was only reasonable to assume he still had them. Between 1998 and 2002, all we had to go on were CIA interpretations of satellite photos, and the testimony of Iraqi defectors and informants. The CIA turned out to be completely wrong, and the informants turned out to be paid liars, but nobody knew that before the October 2002 vote in Congress.
I think you can agree with all of that.
- However, even at that stage, Bush and his cadre were lying to the public. If they had said that their best estimate was that Saddam still had WMDs, then fine, I would have agreed. But they went far beyond that.
They didn’t just say, “In the absence of UN inspectors, we have to assume that Saddam is building and stockpiling WMDs.” Instead, they said there was NO DOUBT that he was doing so. Condi said that the only possible use for Saddam’s aluminum tubes was for uranium-enriching centrifuges, even though our own DOE had told her that they were unsuitable for that purpose. Cheney said that it was “pretty well established” that one of Saddam’s lieutenants had met with al Qaeda people in Poland, long after the CIA had debunked it. Bush included the spurious “African uranium” charge in his SOTU, even though it had been debunked by the CIA and IAEA. Colin Powell forever destroyed his credibility by rehashing all of this in front of the UN, and saying, “These are facts, not assertions,” when they were not only just assertions, they were assertions based mostly on the word of one paid liar, now known as Curveball.
But even if Iraq had chemical weapons, so what? As dismal as most Americans are in world geography, most know that Iraq is on the other side of the world, so their mustard gas is no threat to us.
It wasn’t enough, so Bush had to go beyond even WMDs. He had to link Saddam to al Qaeda, who had attacked US soil. There was no evidence for it, but that didn’t stop Bush and his pals from implying that Saddam and Bin Laden were joined at the hip, every chance they got. Their favorite technique was to say there was a known al Qaeda presence in Iraq, implying that they had offices in Baghdad, when the only known al Qaedas were in the virulently anti-Saddam Kurdish territories, which were protected by US warplanes enforcing a no-fly zone, so Saddam couldn’t possibly do anything to remove them.
- AFTER the October 2002 vote of Congress which authorized military action IF, AND ONLY IF, Bush certified in writing that all measures short of war had failed, everything changed. The purpose of the vote, at least in the minds of many Democrats, was to force Saddam to let the UN inspectors back into Iraq, to PREVENT invasion, which is why I bristle when people casually say the Dems voted for war.
It worked. He let the inspectors back in, and he gave them access to everything, including the previously uninspected Presidential Compounds, which many people were saying had WMD stockpiles. The inspectors used helicopters to be able to swoop in on remote locations with no warning. They used sophisticated equipment like ground-penetrating radar to ensure that there were no hidden rooms or basements. They were able to isolate and interview Iraqi scientists about their research and facilities.
And after some initial foot-dragging, they got complete cooperation from the Iraqis, to the point where they were even destroying some conventional missiles that the UN determined flew 110 miles rather than the allowed 90 miles (Iraq is about 7000 miles from the US), to the point where Hans Blix called them “proactive” in his last report to the UN on March 7, almost two weeks before Bush invaded.
Whatever you can say about what Bush knew or intended before 2003, to use his words, there is NO DOUBT that he was lying after the UN inspectors went back into Iraq in November of 2002, and issued report after report that conclusively showed that our intelligence had been wrong.
THIS IS THE CRUCIAL POINT. Everyone agrees today that our intelligence was wrong. Republicans now use it as an excuse. But we didn’t find out our intelligence was wrong only after we invaded. We found out four months BEFORE we invaded, after the UN inspectors went back into Iraq in November of 2002. Bush had four and a half months between that time, and the day he gave the order to invade. And he KNEW that what he had been saying was wrong all of that time, and yet he kept on saying it.
There were no working WMDs, no stockpiles, no factories, no research programs. When the UN went in in November 2002, they first went to the sites that the CIA had identified as WMD facilities, either by satellite photos or by Chalabi’s paid liars. In every case, they found no sign of WMD activity. In many cases, it was obvious that the sites had been long abandoned. There was even a story that made it to the national news where reporters visited a site that the CIA had identified as a chemical weapons factory, and found that it didn’t even have indoor plumbing.
So we KNEW, months before Bush invaded, that our intelligence was wrong. But Bush and his cadre kept repeating the same scary bad intelligence, which they now knew was wrong, as fact. THEY WERE LYING WHEN THEY DID THAT.
- The State of the Union Address is arguably the most important speech the President gives each year. In 2003, Bush used the SOTU as propaganda for his invasion.
He said
[QUOTE=George W. Bush]
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
[/QUOTE]
I watched that speech live, and I was dumbfounded, because an hour earlier, I had watched the PBS Newshour, where they interviewed United Nations chief nuclear weapons inspector Mohamed ElBaradei. And he said this, an hour before Bush lied about it:
[QUOTE=Mohamed ElBaradei]
I think when we returned to Iraq eight weeks ago, there were a number of concerns. President. Bush mentioned some. Prime Minister Blair mentioned some. But over the last eight weeks we were able to eliminate some of these concerns. For example, there were many buildings being constructed at different locations. We were able to visit all these sites and satisfy ourselves that they are not used for nuclear activities. There were talks about aluminum tubes that could have been used for the manufacturing of or production of uranium.
We have, I think, have been going through thorough investigation and so far we believe that these tubes were meant for conventional rockets; however, the investigation is still going. There were reports about Iraq importing uranium from Africa, again, we are going through that, that investigation, and we haven’t seen any evidence. So overall, we haven’t seen any evidence of revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq, but we have not done, we have not completed our job yet, Gwen. That’s why we have been saying that we need few more months before we complete the job.
[/QUOTE]
Bush was lying in the SOTU. He was presenting discredited intelligence as fact. He was saying there was no doubt about allegations that the UN was saying there was no evidence for.
- As ElBaradei said above, they needed just a few months to complete the inspections, and remove any doubt. Hans Blix said the same thing, in his March 7, 2003 report to the UN Security Council.
[QUOTE=Hans Blix]
How much time would it take to resolve the key remaining disarmament tasks? While cooperation can and is to be immediate, disarmament and at any rate the verification of it cannot be instant. Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months. Neither governments nor inspectors would want disarmament inspection to go on forever. However, it must be remembered that in accordance with the governing resolutions, a sustained inspection and monitoring system is to remain in place after verified disarmament to give confidence and to strike an alarm, if signs were seen of the revival of any proscribed weapons programmes.
[/QUOTE]
Read the whole report. It says that after some initial resistance, Iraq was cooperating fully, that no WMD programs, facilities, or stockpiles had been found after four months of intensive searches, and that the remaining discrepancies, mostly a lack of documentation of stockpile destruction, could be resolved in a few months.
Blix was not a fool. He understood, and explicitly said above, that outside pressure was what cause Saddam to readmit the inspectors, and that the inspectors needed to remain in Iraq, probably as long as Saddam was alive, to continue monitoring his activities. BUT, as long as they did that, Saddam could not resume any WMD activity without the world having plenty of warning about it.
It’s too bad that you have to keep a few hundred inspectors there indefinitely, but at least nobody’s getting killed, and at least it won’t cost a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money.
So the October 2002 vote had accomplished its purpose. Saddam had caved, he was letting the UN see everything, and they had found nothing. Their continued presence would ensure that the programs could not be resumed without their knowing about it, giving the world adequate time to intervene.
War had been averted. Hooray! Nobody has to die!
Except that Bush didn’t care. The October 2002 bill required that in order to invade, Bush had to certify in writing that all measures short of war had failed, and that only invasion could protect the US from Saddam’s WMDs. In other words, he would have to sign his name to a written lie, addressed to the US Congress.
No problemo, for a man with no scruples. He did exactly that, 11 days after Blix had conclusively stated that the inspections had succeeded.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-1.html
