I’ve always believed that “spin” is not tantamount to “lying.” Spinning is just putting a positive face on the truth. Spinning is not, to be sure, telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it’s not the same thing as telling objective falsehoods.
And when it comes to talking about U.N. inspections in pre-war Iraq, the White House and its allies aren’t spinning; they’re repeating an objective falsehood over and over again.
As Atrios noted after getting a tip yesterday, James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA and a supporter of Bush’s efforts in Iraq, was on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show yesterday, repeating the obviously false claim that Saddam Hussein denied weapons inspectors entry into Iraq before our invasion began.
The program was specifically about the continuing and futile search for WMD in Iraq and the White House’s announcement of an “independent” commission to look into intelligence failures.
Woolsey, in the last eight minutes of the program (if you wanted to check for yourself), explained in response to a caller’s question, “In fact, the [U.N.] inspectors were not there just as the war started; the inspectors got kicked out in ’98 by Saddam.”
Another listener called in to insist that Woolsey was completely off-base and that UNMOVIC inspectors were on the ground for months, led by Hans Blix, and that there was enormous international support for the inspections to continue when the Bush administration pulled the the teams out.
Woolsey was undeterred. “What happened is they were trying to get back in. The real inspectors stopped in ’98 and they were trying to arrange a restart and they were unsuccessful.”
Rehm’s other guest, Lt Gen William Odom, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, agreed with much of Woolsey’s analysis throughout the program, but even he seemed surprised by Woolsey insisting that inspections didn’t occur before the invasion.
It appears backers of the war have taken a right turn at “spin” and have found themselves in the realm of fantasy.
You might recall, Bush said in July 2003 that we launched the war in part because Hussein “wouldn’t let [U.N. inspectors] in.” Unfortunately, he repeated the same thing last week.
And let’s not forget that Sen. Pat Roberts’ (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was on CNN recently parroting this same falsehood, saying, “If in fact [Saddam] didn’t have [WMD], why on earth didn’t he let the U.N. inspectors in and avoid the war?”
It’s as if the administration and its allies are just hoping no one will remember major world events that occurred just last year. It’s genuinely bewildering.
As Atrios put it, it’s as if Blix “was just a fictional character, a figment of our collective imaginations. There were no UN inspectors. It never happened. It was just a dream…”
I’m at a loss.