Bush and the WMDs
A lot of fuss is being made lately as the Bush White House has realized that its best strategy on the non-existent WMDs in Iraq is to bite the (missing) bullet and admit that they aren’t going to find them. The next step in their strategy is to distract everyone with investigations into how they could have been so misled by “intelligence failures.” The point of these so-called investigations will be to guarantee that something like this never happens again.
Hooey.
The best explanation for these “intelligence failures” yet published was already available back in October 2003. Seymour Hersh’s article, The Stovepipe, in the New Yorker. Hersh explains how the Bush administration sought out unfiltered and unvetted intelligence in an almost psychotic attempt to be misled. It’s a stunning piece of journalism. Read it.
But even if the story Hersh tells becomes well known, I think it still paints the Bush White House in too positive a light. The truth that is even more accurate than Hersh’s is already out as well. Paul O’Neill has already told us that this Bush Administration came into office dead set on war with Iraq. After September 11, they had what they wanted, an excuse. Or more accurately, a motivator for the public. They could dangle this threat of WMDs in front of a frightened public more effectively after 9/11. Wolfowitz has already told Vanity Fair that, “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”
So, while investigations into so-called intelligence failures are cute, they don’t get to the real problem: Bush lied. They all lied. They knew they were making it up all along. How could anyone have watched them in the days leading up to the war, going around stumping for the war like it was a political campaign, (ahh, but it was a political campaign, that’s the point), and not realize they were lying?
What has really happened recently is that the Bush Administration is looking ahead to the election. They know that anyone who voted for the war (Kerry/Edwards) will be able to legitimately say that they were duped by the White House into voting for the war, and that it’s not their fault that they were misled. (It’s unclear that we should accept this, given how many people saw through the Bush lies, and the high standard we should hold our elected officials to, but most seem willing to accept this line of reasoning.) The Bush Administration is scared that they won’t have a retort to that stance on the war, so they are jumping on the bandwagon: “We were duped too!” they’ll say. “It was those darn intelligence failures! Which, we have investigated, and corrected, and now that will never happen again.” Bull.
We shouldn’t let them get away with once again revising history. The facts are: The Bush Administration was never duped about the WMDs in Iraq. Rather, they lied about the WMDs in Iraq and duped the country. The “intelligence failure” that really matters is that so many people keep on believing this White House.
[UPDATE 2/2/2004: It turns out I'm not the only conspiracy nut that believes this. Someone just sent me this Mother Jones article. Wow.]
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