John Podhoretz‘s column in the latest Commentary magazine offers a succinct summary of the primary objection to the argument that former President George W. Bush lied his way into the Iraq War.
It became habit for opponents of the George W. Bush administration to accuse its officials of lying about matters that were in dispute—most notably, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the inspectors tasked with finding them after the Saddam regime fell couldn’t find them. Bush lied and people died, went the mantra.
This was a wholesale redefinition of the word lie, of course, since Bush and his people believed to their marrow the weapons had existed and posed a threat to world stability and order. They would have been insane to lie, since they would have known the successful prosecution of the war they chose to fight would inevitably end up with inspectors finding nothing and that the war’s basis would come under the very challenge it did. Had they known, wouldn’t they have sought to plant such weaponry as retroactive justification rather than have to live through what happened?
Precisely. It has struck this observer as odd that the Bush administration’s critics never reconciled this disparity. The military found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Had the administration lied about WMD, President Bush and his advisers would have known this outcome ahead of time. Why didn’t they take some step to buttress the “lie”? What was the plan for dealing with the criticism that was guaranteed to accompany the news that no WMD was present?
