Rove: "If Bush lied, then every one" of the Dems who said Saddam had WMDs "lied as well"
March 10, 2010 10:57 pm ET
From the March 10 edition of Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren:
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Mr. News
I honestly think they never thought the Bush/Cheney administration would be so cavalier about American lives to send them into harms way on a misguided lark but obviously they did and the Democrats were wrong to believe them.
Don't forget Bubba's justification for his actions in Iraq. Do I need to pull out all the transcripts of clinton administration officials justifying actions against Iraq?
Oh how easily we forget.
It is one thing to conclude that Saddam was a tyrant and a menace who needed to be dealt with. Reaching that conclusion and launching a poorly-planned, poorly-executed invasion and occupation are two very different things, no?
As for Clinton, did you know that the same group of people who pushed for and were successful in getting the invasion accomplished, the PNAC members of Bush's administration like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bolton, Feith, Perle, et al, were the ones who pushed Clinton in 1998 to do the same thing. He refused.
Once Bush was made president, we were going to invade Iraq, no matter what else occurred. That's why his first cabinet looked like a meeting of the PNAC.
Feith's work has been defended by Eric Edleman who wrote a 52 page rebuttal to the IG report. The IG was also cheered on by the Senate intelligence and armed services committees. A little politics being played on both side?
One other point. The IG report was not a total rebuff of Feith as others and yourself assert. They did indeed find Hussain and alQueada links, just not on all points. Even Zarqawi was loosely affiliated with aQ even though he wasn't a card carrying member until '04.
As for Slick Willy, I'm pretty sure he launched cruise missiles against Iraq, and operated on the same intel that was used later. Apologists can try as they might but the intel was the same.
Did Clinton's actions lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
Did Clinton justify his actions based on Iraq being a terror threat to the United States?
How many billions of dollars did Clinton's actions cost the U.S. taxpayer?
To the point of the post. How could the Dems have lied? I agree with the poster who said that the Dems didn't do their due diligence, but who should the Dems have contacted, in your opinion, to verify the intelligence?
The Democrats didn't "lie" about WMD; they believed the lie that originated from the Bush Administration. The famous "Downing Street Memo" directly attests to the fact that the intelligence was being fixed around the desire to go to war.
So, Bush lied. Thankfully, Karl Rove hasn't gained any shame since he lied to get Bush elected as governor of Texas, so he'll go on lying to smear the Democrats and defend his reputation, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
You sure have that right, there's an obvious difference between telling a lie and believing a lie (even little kids know that difference), just as there's a difference between collecting and reporting Intelligence, versus receiving and believing those reports.
Somebody at Fox News Channel sure does think we're idiots... maybe everybody.
And I thought it was funny where rove said that he wished he and Bush and Cheney had, in response to being called liars as to IRAQ's weapons capabilities, "taken it on in a high profile way."
That's funny, because I'm pretty sure he and Bush and Cheney did respond to accusations that they had lied to Congress and the American people about IRAQ, they did take them on "in a high profile way."
They divulged that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, after he (Wilson) had called Bush a liar (in effect) in a New York Times op-ed piece, in the same month (July 2003) that rove refers to in the video clip.
Of course, Wilson's wife being some kind of part-time low level spook had nothing to do with anything, who cares that she was and who really cared that it was being reported in the media, but boy did that distract and deflect everyone from Joseph Wilson's op-ed piece, titled "What I Didn't Find In Africa."
Everyone went hog wild, and chased that goose for what amounted to years, and to call the whole thing "high profile" is an understatement.
Originated? Are you serious? Did you people just start paying attention in '02 or are you really trying to push revisionist history for your own sake?
Democrats don't lie do they?
I'm guessing your outrage has a statute of limitations dating ten years.
And ANY discussion about these lies is simply a distraction from the REAL issue that should be discussed.
The best info we had until the fall of 2002 was the intelligence we had. Those educated guesses from our intelligence were that we thought that Saddam had WMD's. We weren't sure, and the Bush Administration sure didn't let us know about all the caveats and qualifiers they should have told us about.
But then, we were told by Saddam, after we threatened to invade, that he actually didn't have any WMD's, and hadn't had any for a decade! Then we got info from the UN Weapons Inspectors, who told us that sure enough, there were no WMD's in Iraq. They also told us that the scientists and military and politicians that they were talking to were telling them AND showing them everything, and that they were being told that Iraq had dismantled their WMD programs back in the early 90's.
And THIS is why Bush invaded when he did.
Rove has ADMITTED in his book that without WMD's, the American public and the Congress wouldn't have supported the invasion. Bush couldn't let that happen, so he had to invade before the public became aware of what the UN Weapons Inspectors were telling them! That why he rushed to invade. That's why he invaded without a plan of what to do after they hit the ground. That's why there was no protecting of the munition dumps - he didn't CARE about reality.
He didn't care about the truth. He wanted to invade so badly that he disregarded the NEW info he had - info that the Democrats didn't have when they supported the idea that Iraq had WMD's.
It was also obvious that the Bush administration cherry-picked evidence to bolster it's claims, encouraged (by not openly debunking) the idea that Iraq had a part in 9/11, and even misled (lied to, if you will) Colin Powell about intelligence leading up to his UN speech.
Bottom line, whether it was by outright lies, cherry-picking evidence, or complete ignorance and hubris by the Bush administration, the Iraq War was and is a collossal mistake.