Bush still lying about the start of the Iraq War

With just 50 days left in his disastrous regime, President Bush is worried about his legacy. He’s trying to palm off on us the idea that bad intelligence led him to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, when it didn’t. He said in an interview with Charlie Gibson:

A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration. A lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence.

I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Actually, there was a lot of intelligence — not just secret, but out there in the public arena — that indicated Saddam did not have WMDs.  So Bush clearly is lying.

In August 2002, six months before Bush launched his unconstitutional, unjust, and unconscionable war, here’s what I wrote in an editorial for The Orange County Register, where I then worked:

Saddam Hussein, though brutal, does not pose an immediate threat to his neighbors, nor to America. And despite a year of the government looking for proof, it has not shown any indisputable connection between Saddam and the 9/11 terrorists. Even National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, one of the hawkish members of the Bush administration, in a notably hawkish speech on Aug. 15, was cautious. “This is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc again on his own population, his neighbors and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, all of us. [It] is a very powerful case for regime change … Clearly if Saddam Hussein is left in power doing the things that he is doing now this is a threat that will emerge, and emerge in a very big way.”

We added the italics to emphasize that even she doesn’t see this as a threat that exists today, but could develop in the future. There’s still time to find means other than war to defuse the problem.

Unfortunately, Bush did not choose “means other than war to defuse the problem.” Instead, he launched the Iraq War — without a declaration of war from Congress, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution. The war’s cost was paid for with debt and inflation, which in turn bankrupted the country, bringing about the current economic meltdown.

Somewhere in a hot corner of Hell, Saddam Hussein is laughing.