Abstract

Bush's Lies About Iraq

As we mark the first anniversary of the beginning of Bush's war with Iraq, the five pillars of argument upon which the President based his Iraq adventure are crumbling into dust in a rather dramatic fashion. Lie #1--They Attacked Us: Iraq Supported Al Qaeda. Astonishingly, President Bush, in a rare moment of candor, finally admitted half a year after the invasion that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein's Iraq had any links to the 9/11 attacks, undermining eighteen months of implying the exact opposite. Lies 2 and 3--Imminent Threats: Iraq's Bio-Chem and Nuclear Weapons Programs. A year after using his 2003 State of the Union address to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of WMD as a grave threat to the United States and the world, Bush wisely avoided mentioning anything about uranium there--though he did spend a great deal of his latest SOTU defending the war on the grounds that "had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." Lie #4--It Will Be Easy: Iraq as a "Cakewalk." Reality has continued to diverge from the White House's neat depictions of inexorable progress. In the weeks after Saddam's capture, the number of US soldiers killed actually increased. Lie #5--The Moral Justification: Iraq as a Democratic Model. For war apologists such as the New York Times's Thomas Friedman, if we can "bring democracy to Iraq," all those immoral means will justify this noble end. Here, too, we find grave problems continuing to frustrate the fantasies of neocons and neoliberals alike. The CIA now considers civil war in Iraq a serious possibility.