When Bill Clinton left office in January 2001, he was convinced
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and active WMD
research and production programs. George Tenet, the Clinton
appointed head of the CIA, told George W. Bush prior to the war
that the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was “a
slam dunk.” Almost all of the Democratic members of the Senate and
House Intelligence Committees, seeing much of the same intelligence
reports given to the White House, and with direct access to the
intelligence communities and raw intelligence data, agreed. The
intelligence arms of most major foreign governments, including
those that opposed the war, agreed. The UN concurred that Saddam
had not accounted for stockpiles of WMD that were known to exist
after the end of the first Gulf War. So, according to the U.S.
Democratic leadership, there is only one logical conclusion that
one can draw from the lack of WMD found in Iraq — George W. Bush
lied us into the war.
This has been the mantra of leading Democrats since the Senate
Minority Leader, Harry Reid, pulled his stunt to force the Senate
into “closed session” as a “protest” over the supposed
foot-dragging of Senate Republicans in the “Phase II” investigation
looking into the matter. (“Phase I,” which looked into allegations
that the administration pressured the U.S. intelligence community
to “cook” the intelligence to support the war, concluded, without a
single Democrat dissent, that no such pressure took place). And
now, to complete the farce, Senator John Kerry, during a press
conference on November 14, proclaimed “the war in Iraq was and
remains one of the great acts of misleading and deception in
American history.”
Senator Kerry, one might recall, built his political career on
his status as a “war hero” in Vietnam, due to the fact that he
amazingly, in four months time, was awarded three purple hearts
(giving him a free ticket home), for wounds that, upon further
scrutiny, appear, well, hyped. His most serious wound seems to have
been unintentionally self-inflicted, and the first, of unknown
origin, required treatment with a dab of Neosporin ointment. Upon
returning home he made a name for himself by accusing U.S. soldiers
of routinely committing atrocities, which he now admits he never
actually saw, and which may not have been true. And then, of
course, there is his famous story of his Christmas incursion into
Cambodia, “seared” into his memory, strangely seared, since it,
too, never happened. And during his presidential campaign he gave
the distinct impression that he had met with “foreign leaders” who
endorsed his candidacy, “negotiated treaties” while serving as a
senator, and had been a much better college student than the idiot
George W. Bush — all of which turned out to be untrue.
Senator Kerry is, in fact, the Great Deceiver. So it is fitting
that he has now taken up the Democratic crusade against George W.
Bush, accusing him of lying to the Senate and to the American
people on the basis of, well, let’s be honest, next to no evidence,
and in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
So far, the heart of the Democratic case seems to be one CIA
document, declassified with great fanfare by Senator Carl Levin,
which questions the credibility of one source regarding one issue
(the training of al-Qaeda personnel in Iraq). But it is not clear
that Bush was ever given this particular document, or that members
of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees did not have access
to it. What is clear, however, is that the CIA had other sources
that corroborated the story, and CIA chief George Tenet felt that
the overall evidence supported the story, regardless of the
credibility issues of one source. It is certainly ironic that this
cherry-picked document, in the Democrats’ eyes, qualifies as
damning evidence that Bush “cherry picked” intelligence to
“mislead” the country into war.
It is also fitting, and ironic, that the Democratic leadership,
which has used language comparing the actions of U.S. military
personnel with that of Nazis (as in Senator Dick Durbin’s infamous
speech on the floor of the Senate, broadcast throughout the Middle
East via al-Jazeera, for which he eventually felt compelled to
apologize), now seems so adept at employing the propaganda strategy
described by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as “the Big
Lie.” Unfortunately, this Big Lie has been working (with the
“mainstream” news media reporting the Democrats’ daily accusations,
with barely a mention of inconvenient facts to the contrary), and a
majority of Americans now say that they believe that George W. Bush
intentionally lied about Saddam’s WMD programs in order to push an
“unnecessary war.” But as any watcher of public opinion polls
knows, these sentiments can change.
Despite the often-repeated line in the media, that with no
significant WMD finds in Iraq that “the primary rationale for the
war” has been “discredited,” whether or not WMD are ever found in
Iraq is, in fact, irrelevant to the legitimacy for this “rationale”
for the war. The rationale was (among other things) that we had
good reason to suspect that Saddam possessed WMD and/or had
advanced and on-going programs for their creation. Saddam gave us
no reason to doubt this, refusing to cooperate with U.N. weapons
inspectors (in violation of the cease-fire agreement from the first
Gulf War), and actually kicking them out of the country in 1998
(prompting Bill Clinton to send a few cruise missiles into
suspected Iraqi WMD targets). So the rationale that it was likely
that Saddam had WMD programs — which was the primary basis for
Bill Clinton making “regime change” in Iraq official U.S. policy —
was perfectly sound, and remains perfectly sound rationale for
having gone to war. But none of this matters in the new
Democratic political calculus, and the big question is, why
not?
The reason that the Democratic leadership seems intent on
aggressively pushing a transparently false charge against the
President of the United States is that it sees political advantage
in doing so. It is what the Michael Mooron base of the party
desires, and with the American public showing weariness of the war
and of hearing the casualty figures reported daily in the media,
the time is ripe, they calculate, to hammer Bush on the war. The
only problem is, much of the Democratic leadership supported going
to war. That dilemma is solved, in their mind, by pushing the
argument that they were “misled” by Bush into doing so. This may
turn out to be a bit uncomfortable for the Democrats’ probable 2008
presidential candidate — Hilary Clinton — who is already on
record as admitting that the intelligence used by the Bush
administration was consistent with the intelligence assessments
during the Bill Clinton presidency. But the Democrats will cross
that bridge when they come to it. In the meantime, it is the
Democratic priority to discredit the U.S. Commander in Chief, in
time of war, simply because he’s a Republican.
History will, most probably, correct the current misperceptions
regarding Bush “lying us into war.” And, most probably, history
will eventually render an unflattering judgment on the Democratic
leadership’s current behavior. But that will be small comfort if
the Democrats manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in
Iraq. Fortunately, Bush seems to have awoken to the fact that he
can’t continue simply to shrug off Democratic attacks and will,
with the Republicans in Congress, aggressively respond to the
Democrats’ smear campaign.
