Bush's Lies

It’s very clever of President Bush to argue that Democrats and Republicans both favored removing Saddam Hussein from power and that somehow makes our invasion of Iraq okay. The problem with Bush’s argument is that his own administration misled everyone, including Democrats and Republicans, about the threat Saddam posed.

From the moment Bush took office he wanted to invade Iraq and had invasion plans drawn up, according to Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. “From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said in an interview.

So when Al-Qeada attacked the World Trade Center, Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq. But they realized that would be an obvious overreach since Al-Qeada and Iraq were enemies and decided to first go after Al-Qeada in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. But once that mission was accomplished, they turned back to their real goal of invading Iraq.

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of the Bush’s desire to invade Iraq was our country’s heritage of not taking pre-emptive military action. To overcome this hurdle, the Bush Administration “manipulated” information to make a stronger case against Iraq, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.), who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time.

Cheney and Rumsfeld created their own unit to gather intelligence, outside the normal channels. This cabal “hijacked decisions on the run up to the war,” Wilkerson says. These Administration officials approached Iraqi exiles and gathered all the tall tales the exiles could tell. The exiles, who wanted Saddam removed, happily obliged.

The cabal pretended there was a connection between Iraq and Al-Qeada. The source for this lie was from an exile who was a known liar. The September 11 Commission, incidentally, reported in 2004 that there was no “collaborative relationship” between the terrorists and Iraq.

Then they began scaring all of us by saying Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, including nuclear weapons, and that if he didn’t use them against us he would provide them to Al-Qeada to do the dirty work for him. “There is a real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to America in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein,” Bush said on October 28, 2002.

But again, they over-hyped and manipulated the evidence, including the now famously discredited document that alleged Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. Bush included the charge in his State of the Union address in January 2003, only to have White House officials admit months later it never should have been there.

Next Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations alleged Saddam had mobile bioweapons labs. Only later, did Powell learn that the source of that information was also an Iraqi defector who was a liar. Powell now admits he’s not sure if he would recommend an invasion of Iraq if he knew, as he does now, that Iraq has no stockpiles of banned weapons.

That’s exactly the point. The Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal knew they would not gain enough traction to invade Iraq if they couldn’t show that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was an immediate threat. So they manipulated the evidence. Or in the words of the Downing Street Memo written by an official in Tony Blair’s government: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

It’s time for an independent investigation into the charges that the Bush Administration manipulated us into the war with Iraq. Not surprisingly, Congressional Republicans are blocking such an investigation.

Interestingly, or tragically, the Downing Street Memo also states: “There was little discussion in Washington on the aftermath after military action.” Wilkerson says the Bush Administration believed it could turn things over to Iraqi exiles 90 to 120 days after defeating Saddam’s military. “This is ineptitude and incompetence of the first order,” Wilkerson said.

It also would explain why we never committed enough troops to secure the country. The Bush Administration really believed we would be embraced with hugs and flowers and didn’t have any idea what we would face. They were that naïve despite what Bush’s father had written in his memoirs on why he did not invade Iraq at the end of the Gulf War: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

If only his son could read.