It’s practically a running joke by this point. Even Bush’s staunchest defenders have trouble pointing to charges levied by the White House against Iraq before the war that turned out to be true.
The “16 words” fiasco have made headlines, but the Bush administration was just as wrong about the aluminum tubes charge, the “45 minute” strike capability, the vast arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, the “reconstituted” nuclear weapons, the location of WMD, the ties to al Queda, and so on.
Just for good measure, I wanted to add another falsehood to the list: the Iraqi drone threat.
As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the Bush administration pointed to the possible use of unmanned Iraqi drone airplanes to strike at U.S. targets with WMD. Now U.S. military officials are saying that the White House “painted a much more threatening picture of Iraqi drones than was justified.”
Starts to sound like a broken record, doesn’t it? I mean, did the White House ever tell the truth about Iraq?
“The Air Force, which has expertise in designing such unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, was never convinced Baghdad had developed drones capable of effectively distributing chemical and biological weapons as the White House claimed,” the WSJ reported. “But the Air Force dissent, attached to a classified report last October on the Iraqi threat, was kept secret even as the president publicly made the opposite case last fall before a congressional vote on the war resolution.”
This is an all-too-familiar pattern. The White House believes something bad about Iraq. Intelligence officials check it out. They determine the concern is unfounded. Then they tell the White House, which proceeds to ignore the intelligence for political reasons.
The Air Force’s senior intelligence analyst told the WSJ, “We were pretty sure this [Iraqi drone program] was dead.” He added that there was no “credible evidence” to the contrary.
The White House came to a very different conclusion. A year ago at this time, “Dick Cheney was urgently warning top lawmakers in private conversations that Iraqi UAVs could be used against the U.S. homeland,” the WSJ article explains.
In fact, President Bush, in a now-infamous Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati, said, “We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States.”
There was no “growing fleet.”
There are also no WMDs or nuclear weapons.
There is also no credibility left at the White House.