Of all the lies/falsehoods/exaggerations offered by Bush regarding the war in Iraq, I have a special fondness for the “we found them” lie referring to weapons of mass destruction.
As you may recall, in late May, Bush proudly boasted that those of us who have questioned where Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD are were way off base. U.S. forces, Bush claimed, had discovered two mobile weapons laboratories proving — sort of — that Saddam Hussein had some kind of WMD program.
Bush chided his critics after the discovery, saying, “[F]or those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.”
Intelligence officials in England and the U.S. came forward to suggest that we hadn’t actually found anything except trailers that could have been used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons, not WMD, but the White House scoffed. Then-press secretary Ari Fleischer said the mobile labs represented “proof-perfect” that the administration was right about the Iraqi threat.
Since then, British intelligence officials and the State Department’s research arm have concluded that Bush was wrong and that the labs couldn’t have been used for manufacturing WMD.
Then, late last week, we learned that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency came to the same conclusion.
As the New York Times reported, engineers at the DIA “have come to believe that the most likely use for two mysterious trailers found in Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to make biological weapons.”
In other words, the consensus clearly suggests that the mobile labs were not for WMD and Bush’s bragging that “we found” proof of Hussein’s arsenal was, shall we say, premature.
We’ve had total control of the country for three months now, and the huge stockpiles of WMD that were supposed to threaten the world are still nowhere to be found. We’ve come across two mobile labs and even they aren’t what Bush said they are.
Looking back over the last year or so, I’m having trouble thinking of almost any arguments that Bush made about Iraq that turned out to be right.