Seeker Blog

The scandal here isn’t what happened before the war. The scandal is that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr. Bush saw, who drew the same conclusions, and who voted to go to war are now using the difficulties we’ve encountered in that conflict as an excuse to rewrite history. Are Republicans really going to let them get away with it?

Today, November 3, 2005 The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes on the spectacle of Democrats rewriting history. Again, I wonder “don’t they know about Google?”. The Republicans were responsible for a similar “lied us into war” attack on FDR:

. . . What Mr. Reid’s pose is “really all about” is the emergence of the Clare Boothe Luce Democrats. We’re referring to the 20th-century playwright, and wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, who was most famous for declaring that Franklin D. Roosevelt had “lied us into war” with the Nazis and Tojo. So intense was the hatred of FDR among some Republicans that they held fast to this slander for years, with many taking their paranoia to their graves.

We are now seeing the spectacle of Bush-hating Democrats adopting a similar slander against the current President regarding the Iraq War. The indictment by Patrick Fitzgerald of Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis Libby has become their latest opening to promote this fiction, not withstanding the mountains of contrary evidence. . . .

First, let’s go through the WSJ’s summary of the three contrary investigations, and Fitzgerald’s disclaimer:

• In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration’s role, “The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” (our emphasis).

• The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of “deliberate distortion,” although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence.

• The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding “no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.”

• Finally, last Friday, there was Mr. Fitzgerald: “This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are–have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.”

In short, everyone who has looked into the question of whether the Bush Administration lied about intelligence, distorted intelligence, or pressured intelligence agencies to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq has come up with the same answer: No, no, no and no.

Joe Wilson’s lies have been dealt with in previous posts.

. . . Yet, incredibly, Mr. Wilson has once again become the Democrats’ favorite mascot because they want him as a prop for their “lied us into war” revival campaign. They must think the media are stupid, because so many Democrats are themselves on the record in the pre-Iraq War period as declaring that Saddam had WMD.

The editorial quotes just three examples of leading Democrats who read the same intelligence with the same conclusions. The same conclusions reached by every western intelligence agency that I’ve seen quoted. There are hundreds of similar statements that can be found with a bit of Google persistence. Here is a sample:

President Bill Clinton

2/4/1998: “One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.”

2/17/1998: “If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.”

Al Gore

9/23/2002: “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”

“Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”

Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser

2/18/1998: “He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.”

Sen. Ted Kennedy

9/27/2002: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

9/27/2002: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein’s regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton

10/10/2002: “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. . . . It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

Sen. John F. Kerry

1/23/2003: “Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know the litany of his offenses. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. …And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. That is why the world, through the United Nations Security Council, has spoken with one voice, demanding that Iraq disclose its weapons programs and disarm. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but it is not new. It has been with us since the end of the Persian Gulf War.”

10/9/2002: “I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force — if necessary — to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi

12/16/1998: “As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller

10/10/2002: “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . .We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.”

Sen. John Edwards (the official who really did say Iraq was an “imminent threat”)

2/24/2002: But I do think that the more serious question going forward is, what are we going to do? I mean, we have three different countries that, while they all present serious problems for the United States — they’re dictatorships, they’re involved in the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — you know, the most imminent, clear and present threat to our country is not the same from those three countries. I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country.

A few references for the reader seeking more background:

1) Snopes.com on Words of Mass Destruction Claim: Quotes reproduce statements made by Democratic leaders about Saddam Hussein’s acquisition or possession of weapons of mass destruction. Status: True.

2) Gore Is Consistent on Iraq, A close look at the evidence.

3) What Did The Democrats Say About Iraq’s WMD

4) Glenn Reynolds 10/23/2005 (lots more reference links)