The president was in Tennessee (swing state — 11 electoral votes) yesterday, offering his first defense of the war in Iraq since a Senate Intelligence Panel unanimously agreed that every reason the White House offered before the invasion was wrong. So, how did the speech go? Fine, if you discount reason, facts, and common sense.
The word of the day was “safer.” We’re safer with Saddam Hussein gone, the world is safer, Iraqis are safer, and so on. Amy Goldstein noted that Bush said, “the American people are safer” seven times in the 32-minute speech. It seemed like more. Of course, Bush never got around to explaining why we’re safer. Maybe it slipped his mind.
Instead of fact-checking the entire speech, I thought I’d highlight two sections that I found particularly egregious.
“In 2002, the United Nations Security Council yet again demanded a full accounting of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs. As he had for over a decade, Saddam Hussein refused to comply. In fact, according to former weapons inspector David Kay, Iraq’s weapons programs were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
That “refused to comply” line was rather oblique. Hussein didn’t exactly come clean over what weapons his regime held onto, and Iraq had some things it wasn’t supposed to, but the paragraph conveniently left out the whole “weapons of mass destruction” charge upon which Bush’s rationale for war rested. Hussein couldn’t comply with a full accounting of his WMD, of course, because he didn’t have any.
And does Bush really want to bring up David Kay again in defense of his administration’s policies? It is, after all, the same David Kay who said “I don’t think they existed” when asked about WMD in Iraq.
In 2001 and before, intelligence agencies noted that Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the Gulf War. In fact, former weapons inspector David Kay now admits that the previous policy of containment — including the 1998 bombing of Iraq — destroyed any remaining infrastructure of potential WMD programs.
(Speaking of Kay, Bush’s favorite weapons inspector also said there is no evidence tying Iraq to al Queda and has described Dick Cheney’s charges as “evidence-free.” But I digress…)
Then there was this fascinating paragraph, which got most of the attention in the media.
“Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.”
Let me see if I get this straight. Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, like Bush and Cheney insisted, but they had the “capability” to make weapons of “mass murder.” In other words, Iraq didn’t have biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons — or even the capacity to create such weapons — but Saddam Hussein could still kill a lot of people.
What on earth is this supposed to mean? What’s included on the list of “weapons of mass murder”? Handguns? Sharp knives? Professor Plum in the kitchen with a lead pipe?
I’m also struck by the inanity of Bush’s charge that Hussein could have passed on his “capability” to terrorists. If Iraq didn’t have and couldn’t produce biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, what, exactly, was Hussein going to share?
But that wasn’t the point of Bush’s remark. The president was, once again, alluding to a non-existent connection between Iraq and al Queda. He even threw in 9/11 in his discussion of Iraq, in case we were missing his message. Knight Ridder had the story of the day on this subject.
President Bush continued to insist Monday that there was an operational link between former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida despite reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the commission that’s investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no evidence that Saddam and Islamic terrorists collaborated to kill Americans.
[…]
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Bush was speaking broadly about “the nexus between terrorists and outlaw regimes.” Asked if the president was speaking about a Saddam-al-Qaida connection, McClellan said, “We know there were ties between Iraq and terrorists, including al-Qaida.”
That sound you hear is me banging my head against my desk.
Fortunately, Knight Ridder does its best to set the record straight for its readers.
In its report, the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed CIA analyses that found that while there had been contacts between al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence officials during the 1990s, “these contacts did not add up to an established relationship.”
The bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reached a similar conclusion in a staff report in June.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials contended repeatedly in the run-up to last year’s invasion that Saddam was supporting bin Laden’s terrorist network. They argued that Saddam had to be ousted before he could turn over biological or chemical weapons to Islamic terrorists. The administration also strongly implied that Saddam was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks.
But the Senate report showed that the CIA told Bush and his senior officials in two reports immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks that it could find no evidence that Saddam and al-Qaida were in league.