Again, Bush Didn't Lie

Undoubtedly one of the reasons for President Bush’s low approval rating is the often repeated charge that “Bush lied and people died.” As I have written before, while mistakes were certainly made, I do not believe Bush lied.

On NRO this morning, Michael Barone looks at a new book by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. It is entitled War and Decision. Barone writes:

The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we’ve become familiar.

One such narrative is, “Bush lied; people died.” The claim is that “neocons,” including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have concluded already. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam’s hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat.

The bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission while finding he Intelligence Community was "dead wrong" in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not find even a single case of improper pressure on intelligence analysts to change or "cook" intelligence in order to support political positions.

Barone relates the following criticism of Bush.

Unfortunately — and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush — the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren’t found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was.

Not even I will believe that Bush’s only mistake on Iraq was issue framing. But I do agree that even if Saddam had no WMD stockpiles, we are safer with him gone.