Bush 'lied'?

The San Diego Union-Tribune

It's time to refute this slander about Iraq war

Not so long ago, only the extreme left and inveterate Bush haters accused the president of deliberately lying to justify going to war in Iraq. But now, with Bush weakened politically and his adversaries smelling blood, the "Bush lied" mantra is verging toward mainstream among opposition Democrats.

It's long past time, then, for Bush to fight back, and not just because the loose charge of lying is beginning to cut. Bush must answer because his moral authority, political credibility and American honor are all at stake here. So, too, is a momentous question of history: Whether the United States and its principal ally, Britain, went to war against Iraq in bad faith.

The core of the charge that Bush lied is tied to Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's WMDs were a principal justification cited by Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others who supported removing Saddam and his regime by force. As everyone now knows, extensive searches in Iraq after Saddam's fall found no WMDs.

But that hardly proves Bush lied. Rather it shows only that he was, apparently, mistaken. So, also, was a host of others, including the president's most important intelligence and national security advisers. When pressed by Bush before the Iraq war on whether Saddam had WMDs, CIA Director George Tenet famously replied, "It's a slam dunk."

British intelligence was telling Blair the same thing. Indeed, most if not all of the world's major intelligence services – the French and Germans, among them – believed Saddam was concealing WMDs. So did the United Nations Security Council, which is why it kept passing resolutions for a dozen years demanding that Iraq permit unfettered weapons inspections. Repeated U.N. weapons inspection reports through the 1990s noted the huge amounts of chemical weapons components and suspected biological agents that were unaccounted for.

Many of those in Congress who now darkly suggest that Bush somehow lied about Iraq saw much of the same intelligence the White House had, and then voted for the war. More than 100 Democrats in the Senate and House, including the Bush-Cheney ticket's opponents last fall, voted authority for Bush to use force against Saddam.

Did Bush distort or manipulate the intelligence on Iraq that he received? Either might be construed as a form of lying. But the evidence is just the opposite. The bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission reported that it found no evidence of political pressure by the Bush administration or the president to falsify or distort intelligence on Iraq. A similarly independent investigation in Britain exonerated Blair of comparable accusations.

Belatedly, Bush has begun fighting back. In a Veterans Day speech, the president effectively refuted the scurrilous accusation that he lied the country into war. If his critics have any evidence to the contrary, let them produce it. While we're waiting – it could be a long wait – we hope Bush continues to vigorously defend himself and his administration from those trying, as the president said, to rewrite history.