{"id":1221,"date":"2004-02-09T14:55:55","date_gmt":"2004-02-09T19:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1221.html"},"modified":"2004-02-09T14:55:55","modified_gmt":"2004-02-09T19:55:55","slug":"war-under-false-pretenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/war-under-false-pretenses\/","title":{"rendered":"War under ‘false pretenses’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of days, I’ve noticed that the president has treated the WMD-in-Iraq question a little differently than he did before David Kay’s now-infamous testimony. Specifically, Bush now seems willing to acknowledge — in the most passive, oblique way imaginable — that the intelligence he used to justify the invasion was wrong.<\/p>\n

On Friday, for example, Bush, in announcing his “independent” commission to investigate intelligence failures, said the following<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Last week, our former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, reported that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons programs and activities in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and was a gathering threat to the world. Dr. Kay also stated that some pre-war intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq’s weapons stockpiles have not been confirmed. We are determined to figure out why.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s pretty close Bush admitting he was wrong. The information he relied on has “not been confirmed.” Fine.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, he came even closer on Meet the Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Russert: The night you took the country to war, March 17th, you said this: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”<\/p>\n

Bush: Right.<\/p>\n

Russert: That apparently is not the case.<\/p>\n

Bush: Correct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That “correct” seems to confirm what everyone’s been saying: that Bush’s claims about Iraq before the war were wrong.<\/p>\n

And with this in mind, haven’t we now pretty much confirmed that the war was waged under false pretenses?
\n
\nI don’t want to get into a semantics argument (or as Bush calls them, “word contests”), but if we invaded Iraq because of its WMD, and Bush is now wiling to concede these claims about WMD were wrong, isn’t this pretty much the definition<\/i> of going to war under false pretenses?<\/p>\n

Yet, when Russert asked him if we waged war under false pretenses, Bush rejected the notion, insisting that he “expected to find these weapons.” Well, I’m sure he did, but that’s not really the point. What the president expected has only the most tangential connection to what he told the world was going to happen. <\/p>\n

Bush may have “expected” a different result, but that doesn’t make his beliefs any less wrong. As a factual matter, if Bush is willing to concede now that his own WMD claims were false, then how, logically, can he deny that the war was waged under false pretenses?<\/p>\n

Maybe Bush misunderstood the question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of days, I’ve noticed that the president has treated the WMD-in-Iraq question a little differently than he did before David Kay’s now-infamous testimony. Specifically, Bush now seems willing to acknowledge — in the most passive, oblique way imaginable — that the intelligence he used to justify the invasion was wrong. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}