[Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they were
promoting false information.]
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THE IRAQ INVASION 20 YEARS LATER: IT WAS INDEED A BIG LIE THAT
LAUNCHED THE CATASTROPHIC WAR  
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David Corn
March 20, 2023
Mother Jones
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_ Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they were
promoting false information. _

U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to the media after meeting with
his national security team about U.S. military involvement in Iraq, at
the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas. With the president, left to
right, are Vice President Dick Cheney, Secret, Christopher
Morris/VII/Redux

 

Before there was Donald Trump’s Big Lie, there was George W.
Bush’s Big Lie.

Twenty years ago this week, Bush and his sidekick Vice President Dick
Cheney launched a war against Iraq. They greased the way to this
tragic conflagration with the false claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction
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that directly threatened the United States, and that he was in league
with al Qaeda, the perpetrators of the horrific September 11 attack.
Their invasion, which led to the deaths of over 4,000 American
soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians
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the violence and instability in the region that resulted in ISIS—is
now widely considered to have been a strategic blunder of immense
proportions. Three months before he died in 2018, Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz), a leading advocate of the war and the post-invasion troop
surge, published his final book, _The Restless Wave_, which included
a self-damning verdict
[[link removed]]:
“The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had
WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and
security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very
serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

Other one-time cheerleaders for the Iraq war have voiced regret and,
occasionally, shame. In a 2018 book, Max Boot, an analyst who was once
deeply ensconced in the world of neocon foreign policy, wrote
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“I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake.
Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his
tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the
invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” Three years
earlier, _New York Times _columnist David Brooks, who had been a loud
(and naive
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beater of the war drums in 2003, opined
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“[T]he decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment.” Last week,
in _the Atlantic,
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David Frum, the pro-war speechwriter for Bush who coined the “Axis
of Evil” phrase that justified targeting Iraq (and North Korea and
Iran), noted the decision to invade was “plainly” unwise and that
the war was a “misadventure.”

Let’s give one or two hurrahs for those who can declare they got it
wrong. Yes, this conclusion is now obvious, given that no significant
WMDs were found in Iraq after American bombs and troops were unleashed
on the country and that the invasion, contrary to the assurances of
the Bush-Cheney administration and its cocksure neoconservative
allies, did not trigger a flowering of democracy in the Middle East.

Yet it’s one thing to acknowledge a misstep in policy judgment;
it’s quite another to admit to abetting a fraud. Many of the Iraq
War regretters insist they pursued the war in good faith predicated on
solid assumptions and propelled by genuine concern for US security.
What they don’t confess to is being part of an effort to
purposefully bamboozle the American public and whip up support for the
war with scare-’em tactics and disinformation. Frum, who has become
a pal of mine during the Trump era, provides a good example. In his
essay, he challenges the Bush-lied-and-people-died view, noting, “I
don’t believe any leaders of the time intended to be dishonest. They
were shocked and dazed by 9/11. They deluded themselves.”

“I DON’T BELIEVE ANY LEADERS OF THE TIME INTENDED TO BE DISHONEST.
THEY WERE SHOCKED AND DAZED BY 9/11. THEY DELUDED THEMSELVES.”

This self-delusion argument—_we believed what we said_—is often
packaged with the contention that the Bush-Cheney crowd rendered their
decisions on the basis of flawed intelligence that stated Iraq had
WMDs, and, thus, these leaders did not _intentionally_ misrepresent
the threat. 

But this is a phony narrative. The intelligence assessments that
suggested Iraq possessed significant amounts of WMDs and was close to
developing a nuclear weapon—produced under tremendous pressure from
the Bush White House—were often disputed by experts within the
intelligence community. (And later, but before the invasion, these
findings were challenged by UN WMD inspectors who were scrutinizing
Iraq.) Yet Bush, Cheney, and their top aides (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and others) embraced these problematic
evaluations, as well as assorted and unproven (or disproven) reports,
in order to justify the case for war and—here’s the key
point—oversold these findings to the public. Meanwhile, they issued
overwrought statements about the supposed threat from Iraq that either
were unsupported by the faulty intelligence or utterly baseless. In
short, Bush and Cheney _did_ lie, and those that marched with them
toward war were part of a campaign deliberately fueled with
falsehoods. (At one point, Bush even discussed with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair concocting a phony provocation
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that could be used to start the war.)

In our 2006 book, _Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the
Selling of the Iraq War
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_Michael Isikoff and I chronicled numerous instances when Bush and his
lieutenants mischaracterized the WMD threat and the purported (but
largely nonexistent) tie between Saddam and al Qaeda. Let’s start
with Cheney. In August 2002, as the Bush administration kicked off its
campaign to win public support for an invasion of Iraq, the vice
president, speaking to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars,
declared, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now
has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them
to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” But
at that point, there was no confirmed intelligence establishing that
Saddam had revived a major WMD operation nor that he intended to
strike the United States with such arms.

In fact, the most recent intelligence assessments at the time had
concluded Iraq was not the dire danger that Cheney had claimed. The
previous year, Secretary of State Colin Powell had testified to
Congress that Iraq remained “contained,” that its military was
“weak,” and that “the best intelligence estimates suggest that
they have not been terribly successful” in developing chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons. In late March 2002, Vice Admiral
Thomas Wilson, the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in
little-noticed testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee,
stated that the Iraqi military was “significantly degraded” and
that Saddam possessed only “residual” amounts of WMD, not a
growing arsenal. He made no reference to a nuclear program or any ties
between Saddam and al Qaeda.

While Cheney was building up support for the invasion at this VFW
convention, General Anthony Zinni, who had been commander in chief of
the US Central Command, was on the stage. He was surprised by
Cheney’s stark and harsh remarks about Iraq. Years later, he
recounted his reaction in a documentary
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“It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was
saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through
all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of
credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.” Put simply,
Cheney was lying.

Of course, there’s more.

Cheney repeatedly cited a report that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta
had secretly met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. This
was supposedly evidence of a nefarious plot linking Saddam and al
Qaeda. Yet the CIA and the FBI had investigated and found no evidence
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that such an encounter had occurred. This conclusion was conveyed to
Cheney, but he continued to publicly refer to the unconfirmed Prague
meeting. Cheney was purposefully disseminating disinformation to
bolster the impression that Saddam was in cahoots with the evildoers
of 9/11. This is a damning example of Cheney knowingly citing
discredited intelligence to score points. The 9/11 Commission later
affirmed that the report of a Prague meeting was bunk.

Bush, too, pushed the Saddam-al Qaeda link. In November 2002, he
stated that Saddam “is a threat because he’s dealing with al
Qaeda.” Weeks earlier, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had
asserted he possessed “bullet-proof” evidence that Saddam was
connected to Osama bin Laden. In March 2003, Cheney insisted that
Saddam had a “long-standing relationship” with al Qaeda. The
intelligence did not show any of this; no “bullet-proof” evidence
was ever revealed. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were making it all up.
As the 9/11 Commission later noted, there had been no intelligence
confirming significant contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. Here was
another instance in which Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed
intelligence; they were promoting false information.

They also deliberately overinflated the most dangerous piece of the
supposed threat posed by Saddam: Iraq’s nuclear program. In
September 2002, Cheney said there was “very clear evidence” that
Saddam was developing nuclear weapons and pointed to Iraq’s
acquisition of aluminum tubes that were to be used to enrich uranium
for bombs. Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, echoed
this claim, stating that these aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were
“only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” But Cheney and
Rice neglected to disclose that there was a heated dispute within the
intelligence community about this supposed evidence. The top
scientific experts in the US government had concluded these tubes
were unsuitable for a nuclear weapons program. Only one CIA
analyst—who was not a scientific expert—contended the tubes were
smoking-gun proof that Saddam was working to develop nuclear weapons.
That was all the Bush-Cheney White House needed. It embraced the
weaker case and ignored the more-informed analysis.
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Cheney and Rice were cherry-picking—choosing bad intelligence over
good—and not sharing with the public the better information that
undermined their ultimate objective.

That was just one of the falsehoods and exaggerations about WMDs that
Bush and his crew deployed to rig the national debate in favor of war.
In October 2002, Bush said that Hussein had a “massive stockpile”
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biological weapons. But as CIA 
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George Tenet noted
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in early 2004, the CIA had informed policymakers that Iraq may have
possessed some lethal biological agents, but the agency had “no
specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or
stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” The “massive stockpile” was
a fabrication.

And here’s another whopper: In December 2002, Bush declared, “We
do not know whether or not [Iraq] has a nuclear weapon.”
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the National Intelligence Estimate produced that fall had stated. As
Tenet would later testify, “We said that Saddam did not have a
nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until
2007 to 2009.” Bush made it seem that US intelligence believed it
was possible that Saddam already possessed a nuclear weapon when the
intelligence was clear that Iraq, whatever nuclear program it might
have maintained, had not reached that point. 

There are many other instances of Bush, Cheney, and their aides
misrepresenting the facts to grease the way to war. (Secretary of
State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN in February 2003 that
laid out the Bush administration’s rationale for war was full of
false and misleading information. In 2016, he called it
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a “great intelligence failure.”) Yet Bush defenders and other
commentators have insisted there was no deliberate effort to con the
public. They point out that Bush and his national security team _felt_
the threat was real and _believed_ that Saddam had stockpiled WMDs
and was in league with al Qaeda. On key fronts, they were convinced
that they knew better than the available intelligence.

In his new book on the Iraq war, _Confronting Saddam Hussein: George
W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq_, noted historian Melvyn Leffler
dismisses [[link removed]]
the question of Bush’s pre-war prevarication:

When critics blame Bush personally or his advisers more broadly…they
tend to obfuscate the larger dilemmas of statecraft that inhered after
9/11. Bush failed not because he was a weak leader, a naive ideologue,
or a lying manipulative politician…Tragedy occurs not because
leaders are ill-intentioned, stupid, and corrupt; tragedy occurs when
earnest people and responsible officials seek to do the right thing
and end up making things much worse.

For Leffler, who based much of his book on interviews with Bush-Cheney
officials, the war was a disaster but not a dishonest enterprise. It
was a case of earnestness gone awry.

That lets Bush and Cheney off the hook. The war was a catastrophe
falsely pitched to the American people. Whether or not their
intentions were honorable, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and their
comrades adopted dishonorable means to gin up popular support for the
invasion of Iraq. Two decades later, it remains much easier for many
to acknowledge the war was a miscalculation than a lie. Yet it was
both. It was promoted by Bush and his minions with a reckless
disregard for the truth and with hype that was fueled by falsehoods
and designed to generate fear instead of serious and reasoned public
discussion. Bush and Cheney sold it wrong and they got it wrong.
Without all the misrepresentations, unfounded assertions, and
exaggerations would this calamitous war have occurred? Perhaps. We
will never know. But it should not be forgotten that this debacle of
death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking;
it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation
and lies. 

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* Iraq War; Weapons of Mass Destruction; Bush/Cheney; Saddam Hussein;
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