Myth that Bush lied on WMD revived in campaign

Some myths stubbornly refuse to die, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. For years, the political left has claimed that President George W. Bush lied about the presence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Businessman Donald Trump is the latest public figure to repeat that assertion. In a reference to that invasion during a Republican Party presidential debate in South Carolina recently, Trump declared, “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

With the repetition of that now somewhat familiar charge, Trump joins esteemed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, among a host of other prominent figures. How’s that for an odd couple?

We have become somewhat accustomed to Trump’s reckless charges. What is more disturbing is how widespread the “Bush lied” claim is accepted as true and how often it is repeated by people who should know better.

It bears repeating — and repeating — that the Bush administration’s determination that the Iraqi regime possessed WMD was based on information provided by the government’s intelligence community.

The Bush administration was not the first presidential administration to suspect that Iraq harbored WMD. Officials in the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton reached the same conclusion. That’s because intelligence assessments dating back at least 10 years before the 2003 invasion supported the claim.

Clinton himself declared in a speech in 1998, “If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.” Notable officials in the Clinton administration who shared this view included Vice President Al Gore, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Likewise among Democrats in Congress, the conviction that Iraq possessed WMD in violation of United Nations resolutions was widely held. Among those who held this view were Nancy Pelosi, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. In an age sorely lacking in bipartisan cooperation, the broad consensus that existed on the belief that Iraq possessed WMD was unusual and impressive.

But, skeptics remind us, the Bush administration achieved this consensus by manipulating the intelligence assessments.

The fact that American intelligence sources had been reporting on the likelihood that Iraq possessed WMD years before the Bush administration took office would appear to undermine this claim. But it doesn’t.

Nor, apparently, do the results of official reports that examined the issue of political pressure. David Kay, who led the Iraq Survey Group in the search for WMD in the aftermath of the war, explained to a Senate committee in 2004 that not a single intelligence analyst he interviewed claimed to have been pressured. Similarly, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman Commission in 2005 concluded that what the intelligence professionals reported “was what they believed. They were simply wrong.”

Granted, we live in a cynical age. The motives of politicians, especially, are suspect. But to embrace the claim that Bush took the nation to war on a foundation of lies would, it would seem, cause even the deepest cynic to pause.

Even if this level of dark cynicism is warranted, the “Bush lied” scenario never made sense as a practical matter. The failure to discover WMD in Iraq after the invasion eroded American confidence in the Bush administration and caused support for the conflict to plummet. Why would an administration justify a controversial war largely on a claim that, in the aftermath of the conflict, would be revealed almost immediately as false?

The reality is logic and facts have never carried much weight with those who are inclined to believe in conspiracies, whether of the “truther” (9/11) or “birther” (Obama’s citizenship) variety. The “Bush lied” conspiracists have joined their ranks.

This story was originally published February 27, 2016 at 7:45 AM with the headline "Myth that Bush lied on WMD revived in campaign."