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Bush’s Iraqi Smoke
by Sheldon Richman, September 19, 2003

The Bush administration long ago set the record for misleading the American people. Compared to President George W. Bush and his minions, Bill Clinton was an amateur.

And don’t think that’s a small achievement. It isn’t easy to choose words that will both deceive and allow the speaker to claim later that he did not lie. That takes talent.

......It is an utter falsehood to assert that the president never led the American people to believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11. All right, he never said: "Saddam Hussein plotted with Osama bin Laden to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon."

But he did say, on declaring an end to major combat in Iraq last May, "Terrorists declared war on the United States, and war is what they got."

Ponder that for a moment. Bush had just sent the armed forces into Iraq to depose its government and to establish American control of the country. On declaring victory he uttered words that could have no other intent than to directly tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. What else could that sentence mean? Hussein personally did not issue a declaration of war against the United States. His armed forces did not attack Americans before the invasion. He was a brutal totalitarian dictator, but he was not a terrorist by the conventional definition. On the other hand, bin Laden did declare war on the United States, and al Qaeda personnel flew airplanes into three buildings on U.S. soil.

Thus when Bush said, just as the formal war on Iraq ended, that "terrorists declared war on the United States, and war is what they got," it could have meant only one thing: Saddam Hussein was an accomplice in the al Qaeda 9/11 operation. And 70 percent of the American people believed him.

But now the president says Hussein was not involved. In other words, never mind....