Who is Lying re WMD?

For John, BLUF:  Definitions matter.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From The Wall Street Journal we have an item on the question of if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before we invaded them a decade ago.  The article, by the co-chairman of the Presidentially mandated Iraq Intelligence Commission, Judge Laurence Silberman, is headlined The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied’.  The sub-headline is "Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact.  This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country."

So, the author says that he recently heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, talking on Fox News, twice stating that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

The point in question is not if President G W Bush made a mistake invading Iraq.♦  It is if the books were cooked.  It is if President G W Bush KNEW there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Here is Judge Silberman's concluding points:

The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact—with potentially dire consequences.  I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been “stabbed in the back” by politicians.

Sometime in the future, perhaps long after most of us are gone, an American president may need to rely publicly on intelligence reports to support military action.  It would be tragic if, at such a critical moment, the president’s credibility were undermined by memories of a false charge peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier.

Then, of course, there is the fact that the Press today tends to beat up on the Bush Administration for those Service members hurt by chemical weapons found in Iraq.  So, if they were not from the Saddam Hussein regime, which regime were they from?  Perhaps they are left over from when Hammurabi was in charge.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  We have to be careful with the term "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (WMD).  Back in the 1980s the Pentagon said the term applied to nuclear weapons only, and then the Department of State rolled to the Soviet Union and it was broadened to include chemical and biological weapons.  Thus, if Iraq had a chemical program, by that definition, they had a WMD program.  Then, after 9/11, the US Congress further confused things by making it even small amounts of explosive designed to kill people.  Here is the law.  Practically everything is a WMD, sadly.  The distinctions were lost.
♥  Mr. Silberman, is a senior federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  He was, along with was co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
♦  I, for one, thought at the time that it was a bad idea.