America, Swept to War on a Lie
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by Gordon Barthos
Published on Thursday, October 9, 2003 by the Toronto Star
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President George Bush left no fear unstirred as he made the case for war with Iraq.
Saddam Hussein posed "a grave threat to peace," he told a Cincinnati audience five months before the Marines landed.
Saddam had "an arsenal of terror," Bush insisted. He "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons ... is seeking nuclear weapons...."
His schemes "threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."
And Americans "cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush warned, sounding an apocalyptic note.
This alarmist indictment steeled Americans for a war that would take 8,500 Iraqi lives, cost close to $100 billion, and strain relations with most of the world.
Yet Bush now stands exposed as a spinner of untruths and half-truths, knowingly or not, as the public loses faith in his ability to manage foreign policy — a strength he hoped to parlay into re-election next year.
A majority of Americans now feel the country is on the wrong track, Bush is stumbling on foreign policy and the economy, and the Iraq war wasn't worth it.
Alarmed by this, Bush goes on the offensive today, with yet another major speech justifying the war. Only this time he faces an Everest of skepticism.
Little wonder. Never in modern times has a president peddled so many fictions to justify a "pre-emptive" war that need not have been fought.
Bush's own Iraq Survey Group — headed by David Kay, an American and former United Nations weapons inspector — has just spent three months scouring Iraq with 1,200 personnel, without validating any of the president's dramatic claims.
Yes, Saddam was a monstrous despot who sacrificed a million of his own people in wars and purges. He spent billions on weapons before the 1990 Gulf War, and was determined to preserve sufficient know-how to redevelop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, at some future date. Clandestine research continued into 2003, as he played cat-and-mouse with U.N. inspectors prior to the U.S. invasion.
But he had no horror weapons, and posed no threat.
And that makes a mockery of Bush's claim that the United Nations system let the world down, post-1990, by failing to contain Saddam.
In Cincinnati, Bush summed up the U.N.'s alleged failure in these words:
"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he's moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."
Not true. None of it.
The U.N. trusteeship had worked, hobbling Saddam, constraining his scientists and neutering his military.
And Kay had to grudgingly admit as much to the U.S. Congress this past week. Bush was either misled by his advisers about Saddam's arsenal, or so determined to topple him that the truth scarcely mattered.
"We have not yet found stocks of weapons," Kay reported.
"We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological warfare production effort.
"Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical warfare program after 1991." It was "reduced, if not entirely destroyed."
And "we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile materiel."
This is a damning repudiation of Bush's central case for war.
It also validates U.N. diplomacy, sanctions, and inspections. The system Bush sneered at worked.
Bush's claims were "scandalous," sheer "spin and hype," former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix now says.
Fully 7 in 10 Canadians recognized that, and opposed the war, as did most of the world.
But 6 in 10 Americans gave their president the benefit of the doubt.
And rushed to war on a lie.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
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