Remember all the fun we had earlier this year when the Bush administration really wanted us to believe Iraq was a nuclear threat? Remember the talk from Ari Fleischer and Condi Rice about “mushroom clouds”? When Bush described Hussein’s nuclear ambitions as “a grave and gathering danger”?
Or how about when Dick Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted nuclear weapons”?
And who can forget when George Bush defended the drive towards war in Sept. 2002 by citing a non-existent International Atomic Energy Agency report? At a joint appearance with Tony Blair, Bush told reporters, “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied — finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA, that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.”
Apparently, George, we’ll need a lot more evidence.
In case you missed it, the front page of the Washington Post reported on Sunday that there is absolutely no evidence of Iraq having any kind of nuclear program.
“According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration’s prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.”
The Post’s research mirrors the results of David Kay’s report, which also found no evidence of Iraq trying to develop nuclear weapons or produce fissile material after 1991.
I can appreciate good spin as much as the next guy, but there’s simply no way to deny that the administration misled the world about the Iraqi threat.
The Post’s Richard Cohen makes a pretty good case today that the White House has many duplicitous suspects, but Dick Cheney takes the prize for the most consistently deceptive administration official. Cohen labeled him the “master of fiction.”
In fact, Cohen reminds readers that Cheney ignored inspectors, threatened the U.N.’s Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, and “dismissed intelligence that did not fit his preconceived notions and seized on reports that validated his views.”
Cohen also pointed to a Cheney quote from a year ago. “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon,” Cheney said.
Absolute certainty? The only thing we now know with absolute certainty is that the administration failed to tell us the truth about Iraq and now we’re paying an enormous price.