Kevin Drum had a piece up last night on his site in which he explained one of the many — and likely the most clear-cut — pieces of evidence that the Bush administration intentionally misled the American public in the lead-up to war.
What Kevin does is to highlight five major bullet point arguments the administration used for war. On each of these points, information has now come out, which the administration knew about at the time, which seriously undercuts or simply discredits the claim.
In each case the White House either made no effort to let the public know this information or, far more often, took active steps to withhold the information from the public.
One example Kevin gives is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the al Qaida prisoner who claimed that Saddam had given al Qaida operatives training in biological and chemical weaponry. What the administration neglected to tell the public was that the information had been obtained through torture and that our own intelligence agents thought he’d likely made the whole thing up.
Notwithstanding this terrorism-related example, one area Kevin largely leaves aside is the general topic of Saddam and al Qaida, and specifically whether the two were in league with each other and likely to work together to attack the United States.
His reasoning, I think, is that unlike most of the WMD stuff, the terrorism issue was largely aired at the time. Most of the contrary evidence managed to find its way into the press. So someone following the story reasonably closely could figure out that what the administration was saying was largely a crock.
Given how clear-cut Kevin’s other examples are (of very important evidence withheld from the public), I think he’s right not to blur the picture by getting too much into the terrorism question. But the whole argument about Saddam as an active or potential ally of al Qaida is still a huge example of White House dishonesty in making the case for war — in some ways it’s almost the biggest one.
Just because contrary evidence managed to get out into the media blood stream, that doesn’t mean that the White House didn’t work for more than a year — and with no little success — to convince the public — by subtle and heavy-handed means — of what was really just a bogus argument that they knew was a crock.
I think we all realize that in making an argument to the country to take some major step, a White House or a president probably won’t fall over themselves in every case to list off every contrary bit of evidence or data. During the lead-up to our Bosnian intervention I don’t think Bill Clinton did or needed to dedicate a section of each speech to World War II-era Croatian atrocities against Serbs when he was making his case that ethnic cleansing by Serbs in Bosnia had to be stopped.
But when you see case after case when the president tries to lead the country to war using arguments or claims which not only turned out to be false but which he had little or no reason to believe were true at the time, at a certain point you need to just call it what it is. He didn’t tell the truth. He tried to mislead the people he swore to protect. He fibbed, gambled and lost. And now he should be helf accountable for the consequences of his actions.
