Bob Drogin’s excellent article in The New Republic about David Kay’s report on Iraqi WMD (or lack thereof) reminds me of another example of the question… How can you tell when Bush administration officials are lying about Iraq? When their lips move.
The Kay report was, to be sure, not good news for the White House. After a year of exaggerating the Iraqi threat and using scare tactics to convince (some of) the nation that an immediate invasion was necessary, Kay debunked many of the administration’s key claims.
While Dick Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted nuclear weapons,” Kay reported that post-war inspections suggest that Iraq had “tentative but quite frankly rudimentary efforts.” Kay added that the Iraqi program was “not substantial at all.”
While Bush claimed in the State of the Union that Iraq had 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, Kay’s report explained that his 1,200-member now believes “Iraq did not have a large, centrally-controlled chemical weapons program after 1991.”
Adding insult to injury, Kay even suggests that sanctions were effective in preventing the spread of WMD to Iraq. His report said, “Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced — if not entirely destroyed — during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox [air strikes ordered by Clinton in 1998], 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections.”
Drogin explained in his article, “Kay found no evidence that Iraq had taken significant steps to build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material after 1991. No evidence that aluminum tubes had been used to enrich uranium. No proof that two trucks carrying laboratory equipment had been designed to produce biowarfare agents, as the president had claimed. No smallpox, anthrax, or VX. No chemical or biological weapons ready to fire in 45 minutes — indeed, no poison gases or germ weapons at all. At worst, Saddam had ‘aspirations and intentions’ to acquire WMD.”
The problem is Condoleezza Rice hears all of this and thinks it’s great news.
As Josh Marshall noted, Rice has claimed that if the facts revealed in the Kay Report had been known last winter, the UN Security Council would have backed President Bush in going to war.
Indeed, Rice’s willingness to ignore reality seems to have no reasonable limits. She told reporters last week that she believes “the Security Council…would have had no choice but to take exactly the course that President Bush followed” if the Kay report had been available before the invasion.
No choice? Condi, the Kay report undermines the administration’s claims from before the war, not bolsters them. The U.N. was skeptical about the immediacy of the Iraqi threat; Kay’s report explains they were right in their hesitancy to wage an unnecessary war. What makes her think the report would have changed their minds? As Marshall put it, “Given that [Security Council members] were unwilling to go to war when they thought [Hussein] had some stocks of WMD, it’s awfully hard to figure why they would go to war once it confirmed that he had none.”
But Rice wasn’t done. She also said, “[R]ight up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activities.”
[sarcasm alert] Oh! Hussein harbored ambitions! Well, why didn’t they just say so? Standing in the way of Hussein’s ambitions is a perfectly good reason to wage a costly and bloody invasion and occupation.
Moving the goal posts, up-is-down-style arguments, Orwellian denials, Twilight Zone politics…you know the story.