Did Bush Lie Us into the Iraq War?

People who defend Bush's rush to war - first demanding inspections, then demanding the inspectors leave Iraq to make way for the massive terror bombing and invasion - deny Bush lied about Iraq. I watched Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, R-CA claim that Bush didn't lie about anything at a House International Relations Committee session. Wrong. Bush lied several times about Iraq with the intent of inflaming the public in support of his plans to attack Iraq.

Sometimes people less fanatical than the overheated Rohrbacher try to claim Bush may not have known all these statements were false, therefore he "meant well" but was wrong - not lying. But Bush, Cheney and others were rigging the entire intelligence system to make sure they got the information they wanted, then they were relying on that to support misleading and highly provocative statements intended to drive the US into war.

As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh explained: "The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic - and potentially just as troublesome." He quoted "Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book 'The Threatening Storm' generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein [who said] what the Bush people did was 'dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership."

In the process Pollack and Hersh describe, the Bush Administration believed the professional intelligence system was "deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them." Although, "They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information," according to Pollack. It gets worse. The Administration was "forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information." As Hersh reports, "The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. 'The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments.'"

See: THE STOVEPIPE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons. The New Yorker, 10-27-03: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

Bush lied with bad intent. No "meant well" defense possible.

There are many ways to lie. Someone can lie by saying something while knowing the statement is wrong, obviously. Knowingly implying certainty about a statement which is uncertain is also lying. Many of Bush's and his administration's statements fall into the latter category. Some fall into the first, such as their promise to exhaust every non-military approach before using military force against Iraq. That was a flat out lie.

The Downing Street Minutes and other evidence - Paul O'Neill's comments - establish clear, spoken intent to attack no Iraq matter what. Coercing people into making statements, or bullying them into silence, is not lying per se, but claiming "all evidence suggests" the favored conclusion after making sure none that doesn't gets notice becomes lying.

Bush made and had his administration make many specific and alarming claims which were not true and clearly intended to push us into war. Bush and his people were grossly negligent to the point of depraved disregard for the loss of life resulting from the war he (mis)led us into. Bush, Cheney et al knew or should have known - and often were on actual notice - that at least some of the key claims about Iraq were either false or not clearly supported by evidence.

"Intelligence" includes rumor, conjecture, and a lot of otherwise questionable information which is not "evidence" in any sense. Public statements relying on "intelligence" of this dubious value but presented as known facts - intended to whip the public into support of war - is dishonest at best. Overstating the accuracy of this "intelligence" is essentially lying.

Exaggerating this unverified information to further an objective is lying just like giving someone what you know is a $1 bill and calling it a ten is lying. The yellow cake from Africa claim in the State of the Union address of 2003 was just the most notorious example. Statements by Bush and Cheney at convictbushcheney.org are lies or misstatements of fact delivered with misleading sense of certitude: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=Bush-Cheney_Misleading

One can be wrong and well-meaning, but not when pretending certitude about matters of life and death (as in "I know this isn't poison, drink it. Oops, I was wrong.") There are no "well-meaning" mistakes about taking a nation to war this way. Either Bush is a liar, he's so depraved he doesn't care about innocent life, or he's a fool who isn't qualified to plan a bachelor party.