A Tired Topic
Matthew Yglesias has a nice example of the Bush method: not quite lying, and not telling an intelligence professional what to say, but ... not exactly being honest (if he understood what he was saying).
There was an intelligence report that said if Saddam's Iraq had enough "weapons-grade fissile material" (uranium) for a bomb, then a year later they could have an actual nuclear bomb. In October 2002, Bush rendered it this way: "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year...."
So far, so good. What is missing is the fact that the intelligence report emphasized that Saddam had no enriched uranium at all, and would have difficulty getting any. Even with help, it would take five to seven years--before the commencement of the one-year countdown.
The intelligence report was wrong; it exaggerated the danger posed by Saddam, who was probably more than seven or eight years from having a working nuclear bomb. Saddam had demolished WMDs, and moved in the direction of having none at all--quite likely he had actually arrived at that destination. He wasn't in the process of accumulating such weapons.
Bush went much farther, however, and gave the impression to a hearer--even a fairly careful hearer--that Saddam could have a bomb in one year, rather than seven or eight. The effect of Bush's remarks wasn't simply to go to the scarier extreme in a range of possibilities, in order to be sure not to trust Saddam, or leave things to chance; Bush created a fantasy world in which Saddam supposedly posed a threat (OK, OK, an almost-imminent threat) to the United States which, in reality, he didn't pose at all.
Kevin Drum recounts how the UN inspectors were quite active in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. They didn't choose sites to inspect at random; they concentrated on sites suggested by the Americans, who were obviously hoping for great photo ops from showing the extent of Saddam's nefarious plans. Site after site, again after again, nothing was found.
"George Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 not because he was convinced Iraq had WMD, but because he was becoming scared that Iraq didn't have WMD and that further inspections would prove it beyond any doubt. Facts on the ground have never been allowed to interfere with George Bush's worldview, and he wasn't about to take the chance that they might interfere with his war."
As for the Brits, who are in the news again: I have simply never understood the idea that if the Americans can't get information on some obscure part of the world, the Brits can help out. The Brits? What do they know about anything? When they are brought up now in support of the Niger story (where's our Evelyn Waugh to give this the treatment it deserves?), this is literally one of the last gasps of Chalabi's influence. (Brought to you by the U.S. taxpayer). Instead of a story simply being repeated by the same person, it comes from an apparently independent source, who got it from...er, the same person.
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