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The Party of Defeat's Top Five Lies About Iraq
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/10/2008
FROM THE BEGINNING, THE WAR HAS BEEN BASED ON LIES, DECEPTION, AND PROPAGANDA: the war against President Bush, that is. Beginning five years ago next month, the Party of Defeat's attempts to discredit the commander-in-chief in the midst of a war have continued without quarter, undeterred by factual refutation, rational discourse, measurable progress in Iraq, or palpable damage to the morale of American soldiers in a very hostile part of the world. The Left's campaign against the very war many of its banner-wavers voted to authorize has been built upon a tissues of lies layered upon one another, big and small, consequential and unspeakably petty, political and military, and aimed at the war's rationale and prosecution -- and those implementing both.
Of the scores of such fabrications, it would be difficult to quantify the most damaging or widely held. However, here is in an attempt at recounting some of the most commonly parroted lies of the antiwar echo chamber.
1. “Bush Lied, People Died.”
One of the chief targets of any enemy campaign is not one reached by any bomb, biological agent, or terrorist attack: it is psychological. If the enemy can undermine his opponents' self-confidence or feeling of certainty in his own moral purpose, he can win without firing a shot. This is the most successful aspect of the Left's campaign against President Bush and the war in Iraq, embodied in one pithy, vapid saying: "Bush Lied, People Died."
The specific instance of the president's alleged mendacity is ever-shifting. Its sources have sometimes been Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, both proven to be liars themselves by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The theme of the president's alleged lies tends to be the case for the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. However, as one prominent politician has stated:
The intelligence from Bush I to Clinton to Bush II was consistent. That intelligence…was very strong on the continuing presence of biological and chemical programs…It was also very consistent on the continuing effort to develop nuclear capacity
This picture of a threatening Iraq projected itself far beyond the U.S. intelligence community:
The consensus was the same, from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. It was the same intelligence belief that our allies and friends around the world shared.
These quotations do not come from John McCain, Donald Rumsfeld, or another fire-breathing "neocon": they were spoken by Hillary Clinton, one of the voices now declaiming the president misled her about the war.
If Bush lied to her, so, too, did the best and brightest of her own fantasy administration. According to the print media, "She said she confirmed Bush administration assessments with private briefings from experts from her husband's administration." This may explain why she did not bother to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Although the NIE had been requested by Senate Democrats, only six senators took the time to peruse its contents. (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was not among them, either.) Yet the NIE simply codified the foregoing intelligence consensus on Iraq shared by previous administrations and the CIA's colleagues around the world, all well beyond the controlling hand of Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, and Alcoa. This broad agreement on the threat of Saddam Hussein, however wrong it may have been, represented bipartisan territory, explaining why so many left-wing Democrats echoed the president on Baghdad's continuing danger.
This intelligence -- similar to that given to the president every morning, though less alarmist -- was available to Congress, yet they refused to read it, because they based their votes on political expediency. As David Horowitz and I document in our book Party of Defeat, the war-against-the-war (and by extension, the war against the American soldiers fighting to secure victory in that war) began in the summer of 2003, led by Ted Kennedy and Ellen Tauscher. In July 2003, the Democratic National Committee launched an ad entitled, "Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People." Yet many nationally elected Democrats had voted for the war just months earlier. There had been no sea-change, no windfall revelation of the president's deception (aside from those errants cited earlier); the Democratic Left simply tired of its charade. After the first Gulf War, savvy leftists resolved never to get caught on the wrong side of a popular war; thus, they hedged their bets, voting for the war as an act of cowardice, then turned on the war they set in motion at their earliest convenience.
In this muddled mess, somehow it is President Bush who is tarred as inauthentic.
2. “Iraq was not an ‘imminent threat,’ as Bush said.”
“CIA Denies Claims That Iraq Posed ‘Imminent’ Danger,” blares a headline at one leftist "news" website. The contention, magnified by constant repetition, holds that, to justify spilling the blood of Iraqi innocents which he secretly lusted after, President Bush labeled Iraq an "imminent threat" to the United States. Yet, the Left contends, this is not true; thus, "Bush Lied, People Died." (See above.)
This tactic is most shamefully embodied in the words of Sen. Ted Kennedy, belched to the Associated Press just six months after the beginning of the war:
There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.
However, the president specifically said Iraq was not an imminent threat -- and must never be allowed to become one. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, George W. Bush declared:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
Although the president did not declare Iraq's danger imminent, some on the Left came close. Future war critic Al Gore, remembered now for how breathless hatred stained his cellulite-riddled cheeks in speech after speech before MoveOn.org, declared in February 2002 that Iraq “represents a virulent threat in a class by itself...As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table.” His successor in the also-ran column, Sen. John Kerry, agreed Saddam posed “a real and grave threat to our security.”
Although rhetoricians have cleared the president of ever making this assertion, some have claimed an implied threat of imminence, in that President Bush said Saddam had WMDs and the means to deliver them. Yet that’s exactly what Carl Levin said when he confessed Saddam had “ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.”
Even in his attempt to extricate foot-from-NIE, months after leaving office former CIA Director George Tenet wrote:
Given what we knew then, the NIE should have said: “We judge that Saddam continues his efforts to rebuild weapons programs, that, once sanctions are lifted, he probably will confront the United States with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons within a matter of months and years. Today, while we have little direct evidence of weapons stockpiles, Saddam has the ability to quickly surge to produce chemical and biological weapons and he has the means to deliver them.”
3. “The war was about WMDs, which don't even exist.”
Perhaps the most pervasive of the five myths holds that the United States only toppled Saddam Hussein because of his alleged possession of WMDs. Since no such weapons have been uncovered, this allows the Left to accuse President Bush of "lying" about their existence to precipitate a war. (See lie #1.) However, the possession of WMDs was never the full rationale for hostilities. The actual cause for the war was Saddam Hussein's violation of more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions about his program during his "decade of defiance." These actions invalidated the ceasefire agreed to at the end of the Gulf War. As a 1998 law declared, Iraq was at that time in “direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire.” It concluded:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations, and therefore the President is urged to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations.
President Clinton signed that bill on August 19, 1998.
Shortly thereafter, Clinton signed Public Law 105-338, "The Iraq Liberation Act," which "expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
The Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, which precipitated the present war, authorized the president to "strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts" and to "obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions." The president did so by passing UN Security Council Resolution 1441, declaring Saddam "in material breach" and demanding his compliance or assuring he will face "serious consequences." Had Saddam Hussein verified his compliance, there would have been no war; instead, he turned in another false report. Hostilities ensued.
President Bush explained to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, that Saddam Hussein must act, or the UN must force him to act, but "Security Council resolutions will be enforced." Among the many violations he cited were Saddam's support of international terrorism, his persecution of his own people, and his exploitation of the Oil-for-Food Program (the extent of which was then still unknown). He may have also cited the continual attack of Iraqi forces upon UN-empowered aircraft patrolling the "No Fly Zone," under almost daily fire. Nevertheless, his stated purpose was to enforce numerous UN resolutions dormant under Bill Clinton's Decade of Dereliction.
Ironically, this "unilateral, go-it-alone war" was fought to uphold the integrity of the United Nations.
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The Party of Defeat's Top Five Lies About Iraq Part II
4. “The war is a distraction from the War on Terror.”
The 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, famously called Iraq a "diversion," "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," a conflict launched because the president took his "eye off the ball." His successor, Barack Obama, has repeatedly spoken of "the distraction of Iraq."
Far from a "distraction," the war in Iraq is the War on Terror's central front -- according to both commanders of that war. The New York Times reported that al-Qaeda sees “the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations”– last March, in a story that relies upon intelligence Americans found on laptops seized the previous December. Osama bin Laden himself verified this assessment, stating,
The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War...It is raging in the land of the two rivers. The world’s millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate...The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic nation, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation.
Al-Qaeda has plans for Iraq upon America's withdrawal. Nearly three years ago, al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri sent a letter to the then-respirating Ayman al-Zarqawi containing Al-Qaeda in Iraq's marching orders. They begin thus:
Expel the Americans...Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate – over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas, is in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans.
The next steps were to launch jihad against Iraq's neighbors before enlarging the war to Israel, and ultimately America.
This is their quest. Preventing it is no diversion.
5. “Opposing the war has no demoralizing effect on the troops.”
In theory, it is possible to oppose a given war without opposing those fighting it. However, as Henry Mencken said about Christianity, “nobody’s tried it yet.” If one believes American soldiers are pawns in “an imperial grand strategy” to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/re...ive=9325&path=
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Soon, such a critic will be casting aspersions at the troops he claims to support. Witness John Kerry telling CBS’s Bob Schieffer that "young American soldiers" are "going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children – you know, women – breaking sort of the customs of the, of, the historical customs, religious customs."
Hear Jack Murtha bellow, "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."
See timid Dick Durbin prattle in monotone that soldiers guarding al-Qaeda henchmen in Iraq are no better than "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings," with no more forethought than if he were weighing in on the merits or demerits of a farm subsidy bill.
Soon, such critics will write openly that Osama bin Laden "made sense to me." If you share these views, Osama may one day take his cues from you, cribbing his videotapes from your movies, citing your phony war statistics, or calling you "among the most capable" of his fifth column.
This fifth column, this Party of Defeat does what no external power can dream of: undermine the war from within.
Bush Oversimplified Iraq Intelligence, Report Says
Quote:
Jeff Bliss
Thu Jun 5, 10:11 AM ET
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell exaggerated and oversimplified intelligence about the threat Iraq posed before the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, according to a Senate report.
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In their speeches, Bush and his deputies failed to note disagreements among intelligence agencies and made too much of links between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, said the report, which the Senate Intelligence Committee released on its Web site this morning.
The report also found that some administration statements on Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological weapons capability jibed with U.S. intelligence at the time.
``The report documents significant instances in which the administration went beyond what the intelligence community knew or believed in making public claims,'' Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, wrote in the report.
The report echoes earlier criticism from Congress that Bush and Powell distorted intelligence that showed Iraq was developing nuclear or chemical weapons, said Loch Johnson, a political science professor at the University of Georgia in Athens who has written extensively about intelligence.
``Here is some further evidence that Bush, Cheney, Powell and others said things to the public that were in direct contradiction with our best intelligence reports at the time,'' he said in an e-mail.
`Partisan Exercise'
In comments attached to the report, four committee members, including Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri, the panel's senior Republican, said the report's conclusions were politically motivated.
``The report released today confirmed our early suspicions,'' Bond wrote. The investigation ``has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise.''
The report was released after four years in which Democrats and Republicans accused each other of politicizing its contents. While the Republicans pressed for including statements from President Bill Clinton's administration and Democratic lawmakers, the report focuses only on Bush administration speeches.
White House Response
At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino said there was nothing especially new in the report concerning Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
``We had the intelligence that we had, it was fully vetted and it was wrong,'' Perino said. ``We certainly regret that, and we've taken measures to fix it.''
``Intelligence is never going to be a perfect science,'' Perino said. ``We've been as forthcoming as we possibly can.''
A second report released today by the committee criticized Defense Department officials for not keeping intelligence officials better informed about meetings with Iranian dissidents in Rome in December 2001.
Two Republicans, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, joined the committee's eight Democrats in supporting the two reports' conclusions.
The reports are the final in a series the committee has released examining the mistakes made by intelligence and administration officials who insisted Hussein had the weapons.
Pre-War Speeches
The report on administration officials' comments focuses on five speeches Cheney, Powell and Bush gave before the Iraq war, including Powell's much-criticized Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations' Security Council and Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech and 2002 address the UN General Assembly.
The report said Bush and others exaggerated the possibility that Iraq would use unmanned aerial vehicles to carry weapons to be detonated in the U.S. Top administration officials also failed to express the shortcomings in Iraq's biological weapons program that intelligence agencies had noted, the report said.
The Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of State's intelligence unit, thought there wasn't evidence that Iraq had a nuclear program, disagreeing with the assessment of other agencies. This dispute wasn't mentioned in comments by Powell, Cheney or Bush, the report said.
The report pointed to Bush's infamous assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, which has since been discounted, and to administration officials' incorrect assertions that aluminum tubes were meant for nuclear bombs, not conventional ones.
Republican Dissent
Republicans who opposed the report highlighted statements by Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the panel's chairman, that Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and had ties to al-Qaeda, a connection that has since been discounted.
Earlier reports by the committee focused on foul-ups in pre- war intelligence collection and analysis as well as Hussein's relationship with al-Qaeda and the role of the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Hussein group, in providing intelligence.
On Nov. 1, 2005, partisan rancor spurred Democratic leaders to call a highly unusual closed session of the Senate to discuss delays in the then-Republican-controlled committee issuing the report on the administration's handling of intelligence. Democrats took over running the committee after mid-term election victories in 2006.
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell exaggerated and oversimplified intelligence about the threat Iraq posed before the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, according to a Senate report.
What the press knows and what the senate knows - and what is now being told the public is way different than the truth. In a former life I use to hold a TS/SCI clearance. Intelligence is billion dollar a truth secret fairy dust that gives your military a leg up, or two, or three ... so you try to keep as much of your intel about the other guy to yourself while at the same time trying to limit the other guys intel on you. Follow?
The CIA briefs the US Congress - both houses - in CLOSED briefing sessions weekly. Only the Congress and those at the highest levels of the military, their military intelligence, and the CIA have access to this data. They DO NOT brief governors (even the ones in Texas) or candidates. Those that are making the biggest "Bush Lied" racket are the same ones who had access to the intelligence for years, and in some cases, decades before the administration. Congress is suppose to have deep knowledge and understanding of the truth - and having been exposed to the intel for decades you KNOW how accurate a given assessment is. There is official language used to convey the confidence in a given bit of intel and it's impact to the overall intelligence assessment on a give issue or item.
I hold the CONGRESS (both houses and sides) much much more responsible then the Chimp in Chief Jorge Bush. These folks ought to have known better. They're not stupid people. They have direct access to the intelligence. It was when I head that the congress had authorized the war I knew that it was justified. There's no way in heaven and earth that I would have taken Bush's word or even SecDef's - Congress was the one who said go-to-war so I believed them.
They lied.
The political use of their votes makes me sick. Politicizing the war has a direct and measurable negative impact on our nation's security, future, and military forces. Not since the Civil War/War of Northern Aggression has such unpatriotic acts occurred in our capital.
Both sides of the political debate have failed this nation. All of them are more interested in feathering their pockets and furthering their pet projects. We have plenty of politicians worried about their political future but no statesmen worried about this nation's future.
Where's the reset button on this thing?
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Super Black 2005 35th Anniversary
doesn't matter how many of these propaganda-articles you post, your boy and his team are doing a lousy job, worst in history, and people are ready for change...give it up
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2007 San Marino Blue Enthusiast 6MT, S2000 antennae and 35/20 tint, coming soon...catback exhaust and Intakes
We have plenty of politicians worried about their political future but no statesmen worried about this nation's future.
Where's the reset button on this thing?
No sh!t. What is it going to take to wake this country up? Is it too late? People really want to change the world of politics for the better, but in doing so they are too easily buying into the "hope" ******** - not realizing that nothing truly has or will change if we continue to be ignorant.
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STS...and loving it www.wisconsinzcrew.com
Now which history are you referring to? The actual history? Because I highly doubt you really know anything about the history of this nation (as I hardly know anything). You must not remember FDR, the New Deal, and the Great Depression, or the Carter and LBJ years. We have been crippled as a result of their actions, and the majority of the American citizens don't even realize that.
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STS...and loving it www.wisconsinzcrew.com
Why the Administration never stood up for itself is beyond me. They let this thing spin completely out of control until the Dem's lies and claims have now become "fact".
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STS...and loving it www.wisconsinzcrew.com
If you actually read that article, you'd realize that specifically removing WMD's wasn't even one of the reasons for going to war in the first place.
Yellow Cake uranium and mobile biological weapons factories were. Both of those were false. Trying to paint the administration like it didn't screw up on the excuses for invading Iraq is really stretching it.
It wasn't about neutralizing a threat anyway. None of this discussion even matters. The bottom line is that we were able to get in there and occupy, which was the whole point. Mission Accomplished.
If you actually read that article, you'd realize that specifically removing WMD's wasn't even one of the reasons for going to war in the first place.
If you actually watched the numerous press conferences that Bush held, it was one of the MAIN reasons. Along with:
Iraqi Freedom - term that was made up after the WMD went mission fail. Although making 1 million+ Iraqis flee the region and make them refugees isn't really my idea of freeing them. If they weren't killed in the last 5 years that is.
Regime change. It's turning out to be alot harder than we thought. Simply removing Saddam created a whole set of new problems. Now we get to try to solve a relgious battle lasting 100s of not a 1000 years in less than what? 10? Good luck on that one.
The problem with believing the logic of that article is how it applies to Iran. Replace WMD with nukes and Saddam with Amadinejad and we go marching into Iran looking for evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Hope they find something this time because a "mission Iranian Freedom" just won't work this time.
Johnny, you might want to sit down for this one okay? Now this is from FOX news okay? So don't go trying to dismiss the source. lol http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,359582,00.html U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday
Quote:
"The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war," she told reporters at a news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in Stockholm where she is attending an international conference on Iraq.
Chief among those reasons was the belief, shared widely before the war, that Saddam Hussein had or was developing weapons of mass destruction, Rice recalled, suggesting the international community shouldn't have backed harsh sanctions against Iraq if it doubted the threat.
Stefan, you sure do know how to make politics entertaining! I can just imagine how election nights are over at your house. You have to be a political satirist, you sure this is STEFAN Colbert?
Stefan, you sure do know how to make politics entertaining! I can just imagine how election nights are over at your house. You have to be a political satirist, you sure this is STEFAN Colbert?
Point me to a substantive and in depth post from you, would you? I'm getting tired of the shallow responses from you.
doesn't matter how many of these propaganda-articles you post, your boy and his team are doing a lousy job, worst in history, and people are ready for change...give it up
Obama? He's just going to amplify everything Bush did wrong, which is just a bigger step in the wrong direction for this country. It's not something to look forward to.
The Party of Defeat's Top 5 Lies about Iraq
