Maine Owl

Iraq/WMD prevarication in high gear


Necessary revisions of history

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice trotted out to help President Bush obscure his transgressions in Iraq today on Sunday talk. The "mistaken premises" pain her, and,

Rice: I'd give anything to go back and know precisely what we were going to find when we were there. But that isn't the way that these things work. I still believe that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is going to turn out to be a great strategic achievement, not just for the Bush administration, but for the United States of America.

She also told George Stephanopoulos on ABC that during the war run-up in 2002 and 2003 within the White House, "we talked a lot about dissenting views," while largely dismissing the importance of strong contemporaneous dissent from within the State Department (that Rice would come to lead in 2005). This State Department dissent took the form of charging Bush & then Prime Minister Tony Blair of "distorting" the Iraq intelligence!

Just to remind people of this story...

Bush and Blair 'distorted' Iraqi threat, says US weapons expert
By Paul Waugh and Anne Penketh
Friday, 30 January 2004

Colin Powell's former chief weapons expert has accused Tony Blair and George Bush of failing to give an accurate picture of British and American intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Colin Powell's former chief weapons expert has accused Tony Blair and George Bush of failing to give an accurate picture of British and American intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Greg Thielman, a senior figure in the State Department until last year, told The Independent yesterday that the "political leadership" in both countries was responsible for the "distorted" impression given of the Iraqi threat. ...

In the only moment Stephanopoulos seemed to step back from the unflinching credulity he afforded Rice, he asked, "So, you think we would have gone anyway," in reply to Rice drawing a sketch of the "murderous" Saddam. To that, Rice makes a throw-away crack about not having a "luxury."

There is plenty Wallace and Stephanopoulos could have brought up if they had the desire and wherewithal to do so, including,

• State Dept. dissent to intentional distortion, as noted above
• "Cooked" intelligence on aluminum tubes and centrifuges
• Breathlessly inflammatory reports on mobile bioweapons labs, called "Hell on wheels" and "Winnebagos of Death" in America news, then presented with earnest mendacity at the U.N. by Colin Powell, but even before the war began were revealed by the weapons inspectors to not exist, and then a year later properly were attributed to a liar named "Curveball"
• Endless false rhetorical juxtaposition of Iraq and al Qaeda used by officials, while the "defectors" carrying the evidence later were found to be put-up jobs care of the INC, the Iraqi National Congress, run by "The Manipulator," Ahmed Chalabi

The bottom line message throughout is the distortion of Iraq intelligence was intentional. The notion of "everybody agreed" is a canard.

Obviously this history will live in public consciousness in a manner far from the truth if the likes of Secretary Rice are allowed to be the only authors. Interviewers on ABC & Fox News are unlikely to provide any substantial corrective.

Exit strategy


Maddow & O'Donnell on the "rewrite"


End Times Countdown - Bush Exit Interviews

This makes a fine pair from a couple of nights ago on Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show. Certainly it is confounding to hear Bush prevaricate about his "regrets" about "bad intelligence" on Iraq. Gerald laid that out well earlier in the week:

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Obviously, Bush gives a false impression of how the PR worked to game the war. The story is told in many places, including in Maine Owl HERE, and HERE where evidence Bush knew there were no WMD two months before the war is offered.

But why is Bush running this particular script now? Lawrence O'Donnell on Maddow is just about on the mark about this:

O'DONNELL: Well, blame the CIA is step number one. Blame the CIA for that slam-dunk that George Tenet said about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You have pointed out the problem with that strategy. The president has said, not just on video but also in-depth to Bob Woodward, and he said this many times that knowing what he knows now, he still would have invaded Iraq, knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

So, this is going to be an ongoing struggle over the decades. And there are many reasons why the president can't pull away from that position. One of them is very personal. And this comes out in the work of Woodward and others. He has had close encounters in military hospitals with families of soldiers who are wounded and, you know, hurt for life. He's met with the families of the dead. He cannot bring himself to say to them-we went to war for a mistake, if that mistake had not been made, your son would be alive today. [emphasis added]

The only quibble I have is that it wasn't a "mistake," it was an intentional taking of Iraq--one of the greatest transgressions of world history--a fact Bush will spend the rest of his life obscuring.

The Daily Show covers the same ground in a way only The Daily Show can. They're the only ones who can make a "puppy chipper" funny.