Did Bush Lie, Or Was He Lied To?

Jim Jordan

Are you tired of the incoherence of our Left-leaning comrades on the radio and TV? I try to listen to Air America once in a while to see what the Left hand is thinking. Each time I tune in, the story is the same, the rambling commentator summarizes the last four years in 20 seconds by saying that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into a “war for oil”, and he heads a “culture of corruption” at the White House. When people show unshakeable faith in their own bias, there is no debating them. The story line that liberals have created about President Bush and the Iraq war are not based on arguments so much as they are a gumbo of unrelated ingredients that don’t taste like they belong together. Just as a drunkard slurs his speech, the liberal arguments are a slur of the same “talking points” loosely sewn together by leaps of faith. It’s no wonder liberal radio and TV have been unprofitable.

Republicans are right to point out that President Bill Clinton saw Saddam Hussein as a threat to our national security in the late 90s. His plan; regime change. Did he lie, too?

Former Florida Senator Bob Graham wrote a compelling op-ed in the Washington Post (“What I Knew Before The Invasion”) accusing the Bush administration of rushing into a war with Saddam’s Iraq. He explains that General Tommy Franks complained that troops were being siphoned away from Afghanistan as early as February, 2002, a full year before the invasion.

To this Graham precedes by saying, “I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.” So, what exactly undercut the senator’s confidence in Bush’s honesty? It would seem that the administration was preparing for war too soon, if at all, for Mr. Graham’s tastes. In fact, the evidence for this is in Graham’s conclusion. “From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan.”

So Senator Graham was against the war period. This is not a sign of intellectual weakness. After all, war is Hell. He voted “no” on October 11, 2002. But by framing this history in the light of a black and white case of an administration lying to its people is dishonest in itself. The Democrats are accusing the President of rushing to a judgment of war, and are simultaneously rushing to judge the President. Supposedly, they don’t believe in “black and white” unless it is politically useful. They are an opposition party whose goal is not about truth, but opposition. Perhaps this is simply the nature of politics, which explains why Jesus didn’t want anything to do with it.

This illustrates how a fuzzy argument, a slurred argument, morphs quickly on the Left to a series of didactic, inflammatory statements. Even the articulate, now-Harvard professor Graham couldn’t resist. He says, “The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity.” Translation; the President is a liar. This is why I defined a liar as “someone who disagrees with you” in the New Age Liberal Dictionary segment.

That 60% of Americans now think that the war “wasn’t worth it” is a sobering fact, and a window into a dark future. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, 75% approved the action. Now 40% approve. 75 minus 40 equals 35% of Americans who changed their minds after the fact. Could this be that they now believe they were lied to, or did they cast their vote publicly while they had private doubts? These two positions seem different, but they are, in fact, two ends of the very same animal.

The truth is the reaction to the war two and a half years into it tells us more about ourselves than it would ever tell us about our president. First, the fact reveals itself that most Americans would not fight a war they could possibly see as intangible, not affecting us directly. Thus, only in the case of a direct attack against our country, as on September 11th, should we ever fight a war. Recall how fighting Germany was an unpopular argument in 1941 right up until the time that Germany declared war on America. Deep down, the vast majority of Americans will fight a war only if their very existence is clearly on the line.

Second, the fact that we would change our minds on a war we began shows how profoundly foolish we are. Estimates show that the US has an army six times more powerful than its nearest competitor, China. But how much fight is there in this dog? We are told daily that our armed forces are stretched thin, and there is evidence for this. Without our technology and quite literally “a few good men” we are mere defenseless puppies. As our material success has grown our moral judgment has eroded. We fade into our Lazyboy armchairs and pine about how unjust it is that anyone else be uncomfortable.

Now for the scary part. Divide 60% (total now anti-war) by 35%, and you see that 58% of the anti-war movement was for the war 2 ½ years ago. What does that say about us? I believe it says we are a nation of shallow thinkers. Had someone told us two and a half years ago that the liberation and democratization of Iraq would cost between 2,000 and 2,500 lives, most people would have said, “Yes, that’s worth it.” Recall how the naysayers were predicting tens of thousands of American dead. A little over 2,000 would have been a reasonable sacrifice. Yet two and a half years later, it is too much.

The greatest lie of the Iraq war was not the supposed exaggeration of Iraq’s WMDs, but that 35% of the American public lied about the strength of their faith in democracy. The lie that Bush lied is just a cheap suit designed to cover the accusers’ own lack of a spinal column. They changed their minds because they were tricked? Nonsense!

Democracy cannot flourish without the people’s will, and Americans have just enough will to get themselves into trouble, but, evidently, not enough will to make the trouble worthwhile.