The Ming Report

TRUE LIES

July 18, 2003 - While the President surely misled the nation and the world in January 2003 as to the supposed facts justifying his determination to wage an aggressive war what appears on its face to be his most blatant and transparent lie is not a falsehood. He told us that the decision for war followed Saddam Hussein’s refusal to re-admit UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. That statement seemed to fly in the face of history. We all know that UN Inspectors roamed Iraq for months before the decapitation mission flew. It seemed that when the President, appearing flustered and distracted, uttered those words he had lost touch with reality. It seemed a misstatement for which even the most skilled of his spin-doctorate could not find a cure. On reflection, and the necessary careful parsing of this President’s words, I see that it was neither a misstatement of fact nor a symptom of mental dislocation. |

In order to consider the President’s statement as a “lie” you have to have accepted the proposition that the decision to launch the invasion of Iraq was made by the President in March 2003. That, of course, is what the administration’s spokesmen chanted through the summer, fall and winter of 2002. They repeatedly told us that the President had not yet made the decision to employ military force against Iraq. In fact the President’s seemingly clumsy attempt to re-write history was not a lie; it was an inadvertent glimpse of the genuine history of the Second Iraqi War. The simple fact is that the President made the irrevocable decision to make war against Iraq before his Axis of Evil declaration in January 2002, not as the inevitable negative results of the UN arms inspections became clear in March of 2003.

At the time the President made the decision to put the lives of Americans and their allies on the line the arms inspections had not resumed nor did he intend that they would. In his zealous effort to explain one misstatement the President has unintentionally spoken the simple truth. From the time that he made the decision until the first mission flew the administration was engaged in an uninterrupted search, not for the truth of an Iraqi threat but for a justification for war that the American people and the world would accept. What that justification might be, whether evidence of a clear and present danger surfaced or not, had no effect upon the decision to go to war because that unalterable decision had already been made.

Why did we go to war with Iraq? It was not as simple as a piratical grab for oil, though control of the Iraqi oil fields became the primary military objective and Judical Watch has uncovered an inordinate interest in Iraqi Oil by the Cheney Energy Task Force in the spring of 2001. The tipping point came when Usama Bin Laden escaped the posse sent after him in Afghanistan. That one factor sent the President over the top to embrace the New American Century’s dreams of an American Oil Empire. The new “lie” simply revealed the truth about the months of deceit and deception that followed the decision.