Did Bush lie about WMD in Iraq?

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

I'm not sure Dubya himself lied, as in, knowingly said something that was false. I think there's a good chance he was brainwashed by Cheney, Rumsfeld and co. and was just their puppet.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

They gave so many bogus reasons, while the only valid reason was "He tried to kill my father".

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

It's not clear to me who was lying to whom during the run up to the Iraq invasion. I had a number of conversations in 2002 with European scientists reasonably connected with their governments who believed that WMD's were present in Iraq, but disagreed with the idea that the US should take action based on that intelligence. In February of that same year I spent two weeks in Germany and was able to talk to some lower-level officials. They were very concerned about a US invasion, but did not dispute the idea that there might be Iraqi WMDs.

There was little doubt that Hussein had WMDs during his war with Iran in the 80's and used them on the Kurds as well. My suspicion is that the idea that there were still WMDs in 2002 was fostered by some of the Iraqi exile community as they more than any group had the most to gain. It's also not inconceivable to me that there were some very minor efforts in Iraq in the late 90's to restart their program, and that scientists inside Iraq inflated their efforts in order to curry favor. What ever the actual source of the idea, it's clear that those who wanted an invasion would highlight any and all factors that supported their case.

The US got the security council to censor 7,000 of the 12,000 page report. However, this being the 21st century, Iraq just gave a CD to a reporter who saw that the 7,000 pages was about how we sold them the WMD. That WMD Rumsfeld and Cheney sold Iraq wasn't there any more when they got their war started. The whole thing was completely ridiculous.

[King]

There would have been whistleblowers if it were a mere lie.  Bush wanted it to be true and the bureaucracy created a narrative systemically and fooled itself.

[Mordecai]

There would have been whistleblowers if it were a mere lie.  Bush wanted it to be true and the bureaucracy created a narrative systemically and fooled itself.

What about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson? I saw Plame on TV just this morning.

[Reaganfan]

I think that there is a huge difference between a bold faced lie and a miscalculation.

If I say, it's gonna rain today, the forecast says so and it doesn't rain...does that mean I lied? No. Bad forecast.

As far as the toll in soldiers lives, each one is terrible and painful, but different from Vietnam for example due to our all volunteer Army. They sign up knowing the risks. Big difference between drafted in and willingly going in.

Another thing is that I was 15 years old...I recall much more talk about stopping the Saddam regime's treatment of Iraqis, women, rape rooms, ect than talk of threats of WMDs. I remember them mentioned often, but my gall and that of many others was to simply get rid of him once and for all. The WMD thing was a footnote in the reasons why.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

I think that there is a huge difference between a bold faced lie and a miscalculation.

If I say, it's gonna rain today, the forecast says so and it doesn't rain...does that mean I lied? No. Bad forecast.

As far as the toll in soldiers lives, each one is terrible and painful, but different from Vietnam for example due to our all volunteer Army. They sign up knowing the risks. Big difference between drafted in and willingly going in.

Another thing is that I was 15 years old...I recall much more talk about stopping the Saddam regime's treatment of Iraqis, women, rape rooms, ect than talk of threats of WMDs. I remember them mentioned often, but my gall and that of many others was to simply get rid of him once and for all. The WMD thing was a footnote in the reasons why.

What the Bush administration did was like predicting a blizzard in Miami in July.

[Reaganfan]

I think that there is a huge difference between a bold faced lie and a miscalculation.

If I say, it's gonna rain today, the forecast says so and it doesn't rain...does that mean I lied? No. Bad forecast.

As far as the toll in soldiers lives, each one is terrible and painful, but different from Vietnam for example due to our all volunteer Army. They sign up knowing the risks. Big difference between drafted in and willingly going in.

Another thing is that I was 15 years old...I recall much more talk about stopping the Saddam regime's treatment of Iraqis, women, rape rooms, ect than talk of threats of WMDs. I remember them mentioned often, but my gall and that of many others was to simply get rid of him once and for all. The WMD thing was a footnote in the reasons why.

What the Bush administration did was like predicting a blizzard in Miami in July.

But we ended up winning the war, thanks to the surge which Democrats opposed. I understand that their votes against military funding bills and such in 2006 and 2007 was an effort to capitalize on the war's unpopularity, but I think of it as being rather cowardly.

I don't like sissies. Cream puffs. Cowards. I also don't the idea of America ever losing a war. For example, in WWII the options were 1. Drop nuclear weapons and incinerate Japanese soldiers, civilians and cities or 2. Invade Japan and face losses on both sides totaling in the millions. Defeat, giving up, withdrawal were NEVER an option because the cowardly defeatist liberal attitudes were not tolerated back then.

[anvi]

Guys, it's been widely reported that during the infamous "slam dunk" conversation between Tenant and Bush in the Oval Office in 2002, the quoted characterization from Tenant offered about the merits of the case was a response to Bush voicing skepticism about the strength of the evidence and whether the public would buy it.  That means that Bush suspected himself that the evidence was skimpy, but in his statements to the public and the international community, even at that time in 2002 as well as later, he represented it as iron-clad.  If not lying, that's intentional misrepresentation.  As I said before, Bush and the admin may have been more swayed by geopolitical concerns in the wake of 9/11 than by direct evidence of WMD.  But the representations were off, and the decisions made about the war were practically all bad ones.

And all this obfuscation about WMD, about whether what WMD means or doesn't mean, should not have had much bearing on the decision.  If WMD means some kind of munitions that could bring harm to us, there was enough skepticism about that within the intelligence community, between State and CIA, certainly, to have prompted someone to put the breaks on somewhere.  And why was this tiny office set up in the White House to ferret through all the evidence--for the sake of objectivity?  If on the other hand WMD means chemical weapons, of course everyone knew Hussein had them for a long time and continued to, but he had used them against the Kurds and other possible rebel groups and his own civilians, and he kept them to control those people.  He did not use them against our troops and was not allied with groups associated with 9/11, who opposed his Bath regime anyway, so wouldn't have turned them against us.  So factoring his chem/bio into considerations of waging war on him would be misguided.

It was all handled exceedingly poorly, and the consequences were awful.  I think we should learn from our mistakes so we don't repeat them, instead of defending them.

[Link]

I don't like sissies. Cream puffs. Cowards. I also don't the idea of America ever losing a war. For example, in WWII the options were 1. Drop nuclear weapons and incinerate Japanese soldiers, civilians and cities or 2. Invade Japan and face losses on both sides totaling in the millions. Defeat, giving up, withdrawal were NEVER an option because the cowardly defeatist liberal attitudes were not tolerated back then.

How old are you?

I also don't the idea of America ever losing a war.

Is that why you are lying and saying we "won" the war in Iraq?

[Middle-aged Europe]

But we ended up winning the war, thanks to the surge which Democrats opposed. I understand that their votes against military funding bills and such in 2006 and 2007 was an effort to capitalize on the war's unpopularity, but I think of it as being rather cowardly.

Please define what constitutes "winning the war" with regards to Iraq by naming some distinct characteristics of a victory here.

According to official figures released by the Iraqi government, more than 2000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen as well as more than 7500 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the last US troops had left the country in December 2011.

Seems to me that nobody has won the war in Iraq, because it hasn't actually ended yet. The United States simply chose not to participate in it anymore.

I would break up the Iraq war into three phases myself:

1) March 2003 to May 2003 - US invasion of Iraq
2) May 2003 to December 2011 - Iraqi civil war with involvement of US occupation forces
3) December 2011 to today - Iraqi civil war without involvement of US occupation forces

[bedstuy]

Guys, it's been widely reported that during the infamous "slam dunk" conversation between Tenant and Bush in the Oval Office in 2002, the quoted characterization from Tenant offered about the merits of the case was a response to Bush voicing skepticism about the strength of the evidence and whether the public would buy it.  That means that Bush suspected himself that the evidence was skimpy, but in his statements to the public and the international community, even at that time in 2002 as well as later, he represented it as iron-clad.  If not lying, that's intentional misrepresentation.  As I said before, Bush and the admin may have been more swayed by geopolitical concerns in the wake of 9/11 than by direct evidence of WMD.  But the representations were off, and the decisions made about the war were practically all bad ones.

And all this obfuscation about WMD, about whether what WMD means or doesn't mean, should not have had much bearing on the decision.  If WMD means some kind of munitions that could bring harm to us, there was enough skepticism about that within the intelligence community, between State and CIA, certainly, to have prompted someone to put the breaks on somewhere.  And why was this tiny office set up in the White House to ferret through all the evidence--for the sake of objectivity?  If on the other hand WMD means chemical weapons, of course everyone knew Hussein had them for a long time and continued to, but he had used them against the Kurds and other possible rebel groups and his own civilians, and he kept them to control those people.  He did not use them against our troops and was not allied with groups associated with 9/11, who opposed his Bath regime anyway, so wouldn't have turned them against us.  So factoring his chem/bio into considerations of waging war on him would be misguided.

It was all handled exceedingly poorly, and the consequences were awful.  I think we should learn from our mistakes so we don't repeat them, instead of defending them.

I think that's correct.  To me, it was reckless leadership from the top which allowed the government to fool itself and fool the public.  Bush fooled himself into believing the case for war, but he set in motion the reckless march to war.

Rumsfeld and the extreme hawks in the administration basically told the intelligence agencies to find everything connecting Iraq to WMDs and terrorism.  The intelligence agencies were not trying to find out whether Iraq had WMDs, that was an assumption in the first place.  They just tried to find every scrap of shaky evidence and interpret every piece of evidence with their assumptions in mind. 

So, an unreliable tip from an unreliable source of an unreliable intelligence agency would normally be rejected.  But, the fact that it confirmed the nuclear suspicions about Saddam makes it seem reliable.  A satellite photo of an insecticide factory could be a satellite photo of a chemical weapons factory, so it was in their eyes. 

There was also a post-9/11 bias towards action.  People were afraid so they wanted to feel like the government was "doing something."  This was particularly true in the run up to war.  Cheney didn't even want to go to the UN and when they did, it delayed the war from fall to spring.  They didn't want to wait for any more data to come in because it's stupid to invade Iraq in the summer.

Plus, there's just the fact that Bush hired Cheney and Rumsfeld.  After 9/11, Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq and not Afghanistan.  That says it all, these were people obsessed with regime change in Iraq.  Bush is responsible for hiring people who pressured the intelligence community into lying to the country.

[Orser67]

I went back and forth on this a lot before deciding not to vote, because a)I don't know and b)I suspect the real answer is somewhere in between "lying" and "not lying" (in particular, I imagine motivated reasoning played a large role). It would be interesting to read Bush's memoir sometime to see what he has to say, but I imagine that actually reading Decision Points would get pretty tedious. I will say that, from what I remember reading and from reading a Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction) to refresh my memory, it does seem like the invasion of Iraq may have taken out a regime that was deadset on acquiring WMD's, even if it didn't already have them.

Anyway, at the end of the day, the Bush Administration botching the war matters a lot more than whether or not they lied.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

I'm not sure Dubya himself lied, as in, knowingly said something that was false. I think there's a good chance he was brainwashed by Cheney, Rumsfeld and co. and was just their puppet.

This is my view ...

[Link]

I will say that, from what I remember reading and from reading a Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction) to refresh my memory, it does seem like the invasion of Iraq may have taken out a regime that was deadset on acquiring WMD's, even if it didn't already have them.

North Korea has nukes.  That has been far less an issue for us than the Iraq war and it's aftermath.

[muon2]

There was also a post-9/11 bias towards action.  People were afraid so they wanted to feel like the government was "doing something."  This was particularly true in the run up to war. 

This, more than WMDs, was the real impetus. I wasn't alive during Pearl Harbor or Sputnik 1 for comparison and was too young to feel firsthand the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In my memory I never saw as much fear and resolve to action across the country as I did in period after 9/11. The fact that a majority of Dems in the US Senate voted in 2002 to authorize force in Iraq reflected the overwhelming attitude of the populace.

[Torie]

My recollection is that everyone seemed to assume that Saddam had WMD's, including the French who opposed invading at the time. I mean, if Saddam didn't have them, why didn't he just let it all hang out, to save his sorry ass?  So no, I don't think Bush lied. He should have been more skeptical however, and have demanded more evidence, particularly given that nothing was imminent at the time, in hindsight of course.

[Franzl]

My recollection is that everyone seemed to assume that Saddam had WMD's, including the French who opposed invading at the time. I mean, if Saddam didn't have them, why didn't he just let it all hang out, to save his sorry ass?  So no, I don't think Bush lied. He should have been more skeptical however, and have demanded more evidence, particularly given that nothing was imminent at the time, in hindsight of course.

You really don't need hindsight to determine that nothing was imminent and that starting a war would be a stupid (and not to mention criminal) idea.

[Link]

I mean, if Saddam didn't have them, why didn't he just let it all hang out, to save his sorry ass?

sov·er·eign·ty:  noun \ˈsä-v(ə-)rən-tē, -vərn-tē also ˈsə-\   freedom from external control

You don't get to become Sadaam Hussein by leaving the door unlocked so anyone who asks can just stroll in at night and rummage through your belongings.  If anything that over a decade of war and chaos has taught us it's that Sadaam Hussein did what he did because he had to.  We tried to run Iraq with our logic.  How did that work out?


More importantly when you see Colin Powell (one of the only sane people in the Bush administration) giving a presentation to the UN about some fantasy chemical weapons mobile lab why would any sane person think those people were going to show up in Iraq and do an honest job?  Sadaam probably figured these cowboys are going to invade either way.  I might as well look strong prior to the invasion.

The fact that a majority of Dems in the US Senate voted in 2002 to authorize force in Iraq reflected the overwhelming attitude of the populace.

No.  It reflected the "Dems weak on military" meme.  One of the only good things that came out of all this Bush military adventurism is at least most of the country can but the whole absurd "Republicans good at defense" thing out of our national consciousness.

[Torie]

My recollection is that everyone seemed to assume that Saddam had WMD's, including the French who opposed invading at the time. I mean, if Saddam didn't have them, why didn't he just let it all hang out, to save his sorry ass?  So no, I don't think Bush lied. He should have been more skeptical however, and have demanded more evidence, particularly given that nothing was imminent at the time, in hindsight of course.

You really don't need hindsight to determine that nothing was imminent and that starting a war would be a stupid (and not to mention criminal) idea.

That is a separate point, and at the time, I thought, just why the rush on all of this?  One problem was that Bush had sort of crossed the Rubicon when he sent all those troops into a hostile desert along the Iraq border where they really could not just sit indefinitely. Pity there was not more thought given to that move, and more discussion in the public square at that time. So anyway, the US was sort of in a use them, or lose them, box.

[muon2]

The fact that a majority of Dems in the US Senate voted in 2002 to authorize force in Iraq reflected the overwhelming attitude of the populace.

No.  It reflected the "Dems weak on military" meme.  One of the only good things that came out of all this Bush military adventurism is at least most of the country can but the whole absurd "Republicans good at defense" thing out of our national consciousness.

We will have to disagree on this point. With their control of the majority there was an attempt to filibuster the resolution, which would have given cover to those Dems vulnerable to a political charge about the military. The vote on cloture was not close at all. This was a case of the public demanding action, even if it was action based on weak or suspect intelligence.

[Redalgo]

I honestly do not know if he lied about WMDs in Iraq. The impression I have right now is that Saddam Hussein was bluffing about a nuclear program as a posture mostly to toy with the minds of people over in the government of Iraq's primary rival in the region, Iran, or as maybe a miscalculated move of some other sort suiting the perceived best interests of Iraqi national security. It is also possible the U.S. simply screwed up on a massive scale on the intelligence front and passed it on to leaders.

One mistake President Bush definitely made was running his administration in an authoritarian fashion starting awhile after the war in Afghanistan got underway. Not enough time was set aside to meet with experts and other professionals within government to talk things through, scrutinize evidence, come up with ideas, and get behind a rational plan together. A small number of like-minded folks in the White House instead shut out dissenting opinions even within their own administration. I suspect as soon as the President was convinced, for whatever reason, to go on the war march there was no persuading him or his closest allies to do otherwise.

Until shown otherwise I'll just trust my hunch that the previous administration serves as an example of poor methods in public administration rather than one of deliberate, flagrant corruption in government.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

There was also a post-9/11 bias towards action.  People were afraid so they wanted to feel like the government was "doing something."  This was particularly true in the run up to war.

This, more than WMDs, was the real impetus. I wasn't alive during Pearl Harbor or Sputnik 1 for comparison and was too young to feel firsthand the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In my memory I never saw as much fear and resolve to action across the country as I did in period after 9/11. The fact that a majority of Dems in the US Senate voted in 2002 to authorize force in Iraq reflected the overwhelming attitude of the populace.

PNAC got their "new Pearl Harbor" when Bush failed to prevent 9/11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#.22New_Pearl_Harbor.22