The Dangerous Lie That 'Bush Lied'

From Judge Laurence Silberman, at the Wall Street Journal, "Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact. This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country":

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction—a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the “Bush lied” allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.

The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

Recall that the head of the intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, famously told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. As our commission reported, presidential daily briefs from the CIA dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

Saddam had manifested sharp hostility toward America, including firing at U.S. planes patrolling the no-fly zone set up by the armistice agreement ending the first Iraq war. Saddam had also attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush —a car-bombing plot was foiled—during Mr. Bush’s visit to Kuwait in 1993. But President George W. Bush based his decision to go to war on information about Saddam’s WMD. Accordingly, when Secretary of State Colin Powell formally presented the U.S. case to the United Nations, Mr. Powell relied entirely on that aspect of the threat from Iraq.

Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” about Saddam’s weapons. But as I recall, no one in Washington political circles offered significant disagreement with the intelligence community before the invasion. The National Intelligence Estimate was persuasive—to the president, to Congress and to the media.

Granted, there were those who disagreed with waging war against Saddam even if he did possess WMD. Some in Congress joined Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former national security adviser, in publicly doubting the wisdom of invading Iraq. It is worth noting, however, that when Saddam was captured and interrogated, he told his interrogators that he had intended to seek revenge on Kuwait for its cooperation with the U.S. by invading again at a propitious time. This leads me to speculate that if the Bush administration had not gone to war in 2003 and Saddam had remained in power, the U.S. might have felt compelled to do so once Iraq again invaded Kuwait.

In any event, it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.

I recently wrote to Ron Fournier protesting his accusation. His response, in an email, was to reiterate that “an objective reading of the events leads to only one conclusion: the administration . . . misinterpreted, distorted and in some cases lied about intelligence.” Although Mr. Fournier referred to “evidence” supporting his view, he did not cite any—and I do not believe there is any...

Keep reading.

As Last Troops Exit Iraq, Obama Spikes the Political Football

At Black Five, "Gloating About Something He Had Little to Do With":

Remember, this is someone who voted against funding for our soldiers in combat in Iraq. Also remember that this plan that has now been executed, i.e. our withdrawal from Iraq, was one negotiated by the previous administration before he ever took office.

But that doesn’t at all keep him from using the event as a campaign ad.

All in good taste, of course.

I wrote on this earlier, "War in Iraq Officially Over."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "As last U.S. troops exit Iraq, they leave a troubled land behind." It's a good piece, despite the typically negative headline.

'The Local Government Pension Squeeze'

We're going to be hearing more and more about stuff like this, particularly as the Obama Depression deepens.

From Stephen Malanga, at Wall Street Journal (via RealClearPolitics).

RELATED: The process is playing out in one of the cities right next door to where I live. See NBC News Los Angeles, "Costa Mesa Mayor Pro Tem Talks About Unprecedented City Cuts." And at Los Angeles Times, "Costa Mesa's police chief abruptly quits over council's plan to slash workforce," and O.C. Weekly, "Costa Mesa Police Chief Resigns With a Letter, Calling City Council 'Incompetent' and the City's Fiscal Crisis a Lie."

BONUS: "Republicans promote Costa Mesa as a pension-slashing leader."

Botched Neocon Wars? Hardly

Ideological simplification is one of the biggest problems we're seeing with all the intense debate over Libya and the wider "Arab Spring." One example is Andrew Sullivan's little piece that stops just short of slamming neocons as fascist. Sully draws on C. Bradley Thompson's recent book on neoconservatism, but amplifies the implications without the theoretical context. For background, see Thompson's recent piece, "Neoconservatism Unmasked." It's pretty abstract, but if Thompson's right, there's a lot in my personal philosophy that's at odds with the neoconservative program hypothesized there. That said, much of the current debate over intervention in Libya hinges on the argument that the Iraq war was a colossal blunder of world historical proportions. It's the progressive meme that the Bush administration blew the mission after the initial post-conflict phase of operations. The photo-op on the USS Abraham Lincoln came to symbolize the hubris of an administration many argued was hell-bent on war and profanely dismissive of international norms. There's no convincing ideological partisans otherwise, of course, so it's probably not worth it to make the effort. Yet real-world events have repeatedly shown that the Bush administration's foreign policy was frequently masterful and often quite successful. There's been a long slide in Afghanistan's political efficacy, which is why we're still there today, after ten years of war. But in Iraq, the lodestar for progressive attacks on the "Bush-Cheney cabal," the revolutionary changes in the Middle East have elevated Baghdad to regional diplomatic prominence. See New York Times, "Ready or Not, Iraq Ascends to Take Helm of Arab Bloc":

BAGHDAD — After Libya was suspended from the Arab League last month, de facto leadership ended up coincidentally in the hands of Iraq, the Arab nation with the most experience — much of it painful — with a foreign-led military campaign against an unpopular dictator.

For all of that still unsettled pain, the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari — in his new capacity as head of the Arab League — rushed off to Paris last Friday evening to join Western and Arab allies, where he argued passionately in favor of action against Libya, citing the American no-fly zone in northern Iraq that protected the Kurdish population from Saddam Hussein in the years before the American invasion here, according to a senior official who took part in the Paris deliberations.

And soon, Iraqi leaders, who are facing their own protest movement, plan to use their own troublesome democracy, still bloody and inchoate, as a showcase for Middle East countries. Iraq is taking on a larger diplomatic role in regional affairs as host of the group’s annual summit meeting — while assuming the rotating presidency of the league — in May.

“If there’s a political message, it’s that Iraq is back to play a major and positive role in the Arab region,” said Labid Abawi, the deputy foreign minister who has led a committee to prepare Baghdad for the summit meeting.

“We take pride in that Iraq has already exceeded all these other Arab countries in establishing a democratic regime,” he said. “Now, we can say yes, we are on the right track, and other Arab countries can follow suit in establishing a democratic regime.”

There's more at the link, but I want to reiterate the point above: No amount of evidence, not even Iraqi testimony on the country's democratic consolidation, will wrest from idiot progressives the claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was a debacle. It's all they have, along with endless allegations of racism and the demonization of Israel. And to respond to simpleton Mike Tuggle, who asked if I'd lost my "'neo-conservative illusions' as a result of the botched Neocon Wars?," the answer is no --- because I don't have any illusions to lose.

BDS Lives: Critics Plan to Move Bush Memoir to 'Crime' Section in Bookstores

At CBS News:

When Tony Blair released his memoir earlier this year, a facebook page was created calling for critics of the former prime minister to "Subversively move Tony Blair's memoirs to the crime section in book shops."

At last count, the Facebook group had more than 14,000 members. The effort was a way for Blair's critics to protest his role in the war in Iraq. "Make bookshops think twice about where they categorise our generations greatest war criminal," the page says.

Now critics of President George W. Bush are trying to replicate the protest with a Facebook group tied to the release of the former president's memoir "Decision Points" tomorrow. The page has more than 1,000 members so far. "They did this to Tony Blair's book and I think we should do the same here," it says.

Left-leaning websites are promoting the idea and calling on people to post pictures of their efforts online.

Mr. Bush plans to sign copies of the book tomorrow in Dallas, and critics are vowing to protest the event, complaining on a protest-organizing Facebook page that "his unapologetic attitude" about the war in Iraq "is unacceptable."

Yeah, and Code Pink commie Jodie Evans is on the case, "Move W.'s Decision Points to the Crime Section."

This is going to be quite a week for Bush Derangement. See, "This Bid to Rehabilitate Bush Must Be Defeated: He Left a Trail of Destruction."

While Not Quite Hate Mail...

...There's definitely a lot of anger in this anonymous comment from yesterday:

You are so active in degrading obama. Where were you when our last president ran our nation into the ground? In the next five years as we see our recovery, you will feel like a total idiot for being on the wrong side. Do you have political amnesia? Do you know what the Republicans have done to our economy? How can you sit there and hold your ignorant anti-obama sign knowing our actual history. Not the history that exists in the fantasy in your dreams, but the history that actually just happened in 8 years of national rape. Do you honestly choose this as your life battle? To deny the nation a new try at something people just like you have been F***** up for the past three decades????????????? You think our biggest problems are mexicans and affordable health care? SERIOUS??? What about the billions wasted on useless wars? What about the right wing ideas of a free-market that enabled the banking industry and wall street to bend us over and economically rape us for 8 years strait? How can you not recognize you're on the wrong side???? Are you just plain stupid???