Lying is not the issue
By Aaron Schwitters
October 31, 2005
Justifying an imminent attack on Iraq, the president offered the nation his rationale, stating, "Saddam must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons."
At the same time, the president instructed his cabinet to emphasize the threat posed to America by Hussein's chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The president's Secretary of Defense claimed on ABC's This Week that just five pounds of Hussein's deadly poisons could kill half the population of Washington, D.C.
Members of the president's party in Congress eagerly defend the claims, signing multiple open letters urging the president to attack. One prominent senator stated, "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Mindlessly kowtowing to the administration's agenda (as they are apt to do) the news media parrots everything. The New York Times runs front-page articles about the White House's preparations for war with the WMD threat as the central justification for military action.
Lies! All lies! Right?
Not really. See, that all happened in 1998 when President Bill Clinton attacked Iraq, with the full support of Democratic leaders. Secretary of Defense William Cohen was the individual who made the rounds on Sunday morning talk shows, stating, "I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons." Senator Ted Kennedy was responsible for stating that we've known for many years of Hussein's WMDs. Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards and Nancy Pelosi were all gladly on board, too.
Apparently, though, if we're to believe the claptrap we get fed from the left every day, it's George Bush who "lied and people died." It's George Bush who marched this nation into an unnecessary war built on an insidious lie.
People who tell you this are hoping that you ignore the history of Saddam Hussein's WMD program, much of which is not disputed.
We know Hussein had an active WMD development program in the 1980s. His military had produced bombs containing mustard gas, hydrogen cyanide and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX. But Hussein wasn't content to merely posses these; he made sure they worked.
On March 16, 1988, a day most students on this campus spent sitting peacefully in elementary school, schoolchildren in Halabja, Iraq, spent it in terror. Bombs started falling on their town around midday, dropped from eight Iraqi military planes, and the bombardment continued through the night.
Not strangers to having fighting in their midst, many citizens, understandably, fled to their cellars to seek refuge from the fighting. In what journalist Jeffrey Goldberg described as diabolically clever, this is something Hussein counted on. He knew the deadly gases released in the town were heavier than air, and as the gas crept along the streets of Halabja it fell into basements and cellars along the way, as Goldberg says, "turning them, really, into gas chambers."
About 5,000 people died that day, tragically only a small part of Hussein's broader campaign of genocide against the Kurdish people.
Knowing this fact and others, our last three presidents all sought, with help from the United Nations, to verify that Hussein had discontinued his weapons programs. Hussein, of course, did not comply. On the issue of whether or not he continued to posses the weapons there was unanimity. The current nonsense from the left seems to imply that there was, at some time, debate as to whether or not Hussein had WMDs. Of course, this second-guessing by political parties has no basis in fact.
George W. Bush didn't lie to anyone. Inherent in the act of lying is the intent to deceive. While Bush can, perhaps, be faulted with not being omniscient on the issue, no one has claimed that he knew for a fact that Iraq had no weapons and purposefully used it as a justification for war regardless.
That doesn't mean there aren't lies floating around, though. Anyone who tries to portray the serious national security issues tackled by both the Bush and Clinton administrations as black and white, Republican vs. Democrat matters is disingenuous at best. Anyone who takes intelligence-gathering inadequacies and lays it squarely at the feet of President Bush is trying to deceive you.
|
