The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.
Radio Address of George W. Bush, September 28, 2002
George W. Bush Did Something Much Worse Than Lie Us Into War
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There is, however, an even more heinous aspect to what Jeb's "trusted brother" did, and it shouldn't be allowed to escape down the memory hole. We've been lied into wars before, with similar disastrous results. But George W. Bush did something far worse than lie us into a war: he did it in a breathtakingly cynical and malevolent way--in effect, by holding a gun to every Americans' head and threatening to pull the trigger. He did it by holding us--all of us--hostage to a twisted ideology that demanded the war, waving the gun at calculated intervals in our face, the way any terrorist would. And he told us flat out, over and over again, that if we didn't do what he said, we'd all be killed.
Paul Waldman, writing for The Week, puts his finger on why what Bush did was much worse than mere lying:
What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history. Spend too much time in the weeds, and you risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.
Waldman has little patience for the suggestion that the "intelligence" was "misread" or "misinterpreted." For those who experienced it, the barrage of timed propaganda that supported the "selling" of the Iraq war was no mere lie, no drummed up "incident," but a deliberate, methodical and relentless campaign. In this campaign, intelligence was not used to ascertain facts, but to fashion propaganda to sell the war, the "script" of which, as then-White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan later wrote, "had been finalized with great care" to convince the public that the war was "inevitable and necessary." Waldman recounts the purposeful planning and execution of the deception inflicted on the American public and follows it with an irresistible and damning conclusion:
In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity completed a project in which they went over the public statements by eight top Bush administration officials on the topic of Iraq, and found that no fewer than 935 were false, including 260 statements by President Bush himself. But the theory on which the White House operated was that whether or not you could fool all of the people some of the time, you could certainly scare them out of their wits. That's what was truly diabolical about their campaign.
And in this we can see the base, criminal and yes, diabolical nature of what Bush did. By magnifying the imaginary threat allegedly posed by Saddam Hussein, Bush managed to terrify segments of the American public who he and Cheney knew full well were already traumatized and shell-shocked after the horror of 9/11. By repeatedly raising the specter of "poison gas," the radioactive "mushroom cloud," and the "weapons of mass destruction" he instilled Americans with a virulent fear, fear of the evil unknown. And all the while he knew--they all knew--that it was a baldfaced lie:
[E]ach and every time the message was the same: If we didn't wage war, Iraq was going to attack the United States homeland with its enormous arsenal of ghastly weapons, and who knows how many Americans would perish. When you actually spell it out like that it sounds almost comical, but that was the Bush administration's assertion, repeated hundreds upon hundreds of time to a public still skittish in the wake of September 11. (Remember, the campaign for the war began less than a year after the September 11 attacks.)
Sometimes this message was imparted with specific false claims, sometimes with dark insinuation, and sometimes with speculation about the horrors to come ("We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Bush and others when asked about the thinness of much of their evidence). Yet the conclusion was always the same: The only alternative to invading Iraq was waiting around to be killed.
By playing incessantly to their fears, Bush also succeeded in turning Americans against each other--anyone who raised his or her voice to question the threat became part of the threat in the eyes of their fellow Americans. After all, if you're terrified of something, and you know by God the threat is real, someone next to you telling you not to worry, or worse, ignore the danger, becomes as bad as the enemy.
This is what Bush (and Cheney) knowingly did to the American people. He counted on their fear, not just Americans' fear of Hussein, but of each other
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