Recently a self-described "conservative" and "pro-war" intellectual stopped me in the hallway to say that I was "right on one thing — Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction."
"It’s a little late to figure that one out," I thought to myself, "since most of the planet outside the exceptionally thought-controlled United States of Narnia knew that Bush’s Iraqi WMD were AWOL from the get go. And now we’ve got more than 100,000 Iraqi dead along with 2300+ U.S. troops and 20,000 U.S. injured." But hey, better late than never.
"Sure he did," I said, "but which WMD lie pisses you off the most?"
"Which WMD lie?," the pro-war intellectual asked…"whatever do you mean? The lie that Saddam had WMD, of course. We now know that he didn’t."
Well, sorry, but (a) "now know?" and (b) that’s just ONE of at least 4 or 5 big WMD lies. Lie # 1 is that they existed.
Lie # 2 is rarely mentioned or recalled. It held that Saddam was a recklessly suicidal maniac, which he would have to have been to attack US forces or Israel or any other state with (his mythical) WMD. And Saddam’s history showed that he was a realistic survivor, a vicious bastard to be sure… but not a suicidal lunatic so filled with hatred against Great Satan America that he would have attacked the most fearsome armed power in history…or one of its client states.
Lie # 3 maintained that Saddam would have given WMD (had he possessed any) to his blood enemies in al Qaeda and its Islamic extremist cousins and ilk. That was a preposterous assertion, of course.
Lie # 4 is that Washington acted on BAD INTELLIGENCE when Bush claimed that Iraq had WMD. Bush has been trotting that one out a bunch these last two weeks, using it in response to citizens who ask why Saddam’s killer weapons never showed up. Google up the Downing Street Memo and you can look at some evidence (there’s more) that the WMD intelligence was all just "FIXED IN ADVANCE."
Truth is: for its imperial, oil-controlling purposes, the Bush administration "got" GOOD INTELLIGENCE…GOOD AND WELL-COOKED INTELLIGENCE THAT IT DEMANDED IN ADVANCE THAT IS.
Interestingly enough, Bush started saying earlier this year that he didn’t actually order the invasion of Iraq because of Saddam’s WMD. He undertook the occupation of Mesoptotamia, he said, in order the free the Iraqi people. "Huh, how about that?" the "liberal" media grunted. But if you look back at his speeches and radio addresses to the public in late 2002 and early 2003, his argument for imperial war is pretty much all about, well, uhhh… WMD; the freedom thing is at most an afterthought. I don’t know if this deserves to be called WMD Lie # 5 or not.
As for Washington’s alleged desire to export something it calls "democracy" to Iraq, that’s another monumental Orwellian deception that I’ve been exposing (with no claim to originality) in various ZNet pieces for some time. It’s not a WMD lie. It’s the main post-WMD li[n]e, though the new claim that "we can’t leave because civil war will break out" is now contending for Top Deception status.
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