The Lies of W.

September 30, 2004

What won’t get mentioned in tonight’s debate is that George Bush, Dick Cheney et al. lied to get us into Iraq.

For this I  blame the media. For the past six months, the media has basically stopped digging on the issue of the Office of Special Plans, the manipulation of intelligence, the distortions and the lies. It is the single most important failure of the media. As someone who has written extensively and repeatedly about it, it is, to me, very sad. What it means is that Bush will go into the debate tonight far more secure that he ought to be. Kerry can accuse Bush of making the wrong choices, of not having a clear pre-war strategy, of bungling the occupation.  But Kerry can’t accuse the president of purposefully misleading America, because he doesn’t have the ammunition—at least not from slam-dunk, mainstream sources that he can wave around.

The facts are that Bush and Cheney wanted to invade Iraq for reasons other than the stated ones. They knew that Iraq couldn’t threaten the United States with WMD, and they knew that Iraq was not allied with Al Qaeda. Yet they manufactured evidence to the contrary, meticulously.

Of course, they miscalculated, too. The occupation is a failure, and America is losing the war it lied to get into. But the latter is a mistake. The former is criminal. And there is a big, big difference.

Six months ago, administration defectors such as Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke made clear that the president was targeting Iraq long before 9/11. The media was abuzz with stories of visits to the CIA by Cheney to pressure analysts to support pre-arranged conclusions. There was lots of news about Joe Wilson and the deliberate lies about Niger yellowcake. The Senate was bustling with pressure from Jay Rockefeller to investigate the OSP. And lots more. It’s all been lost. The media dropped the ball. Instead of looking into the machinations of Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Harold Rhode, Bill Luti and others who managed the Pentagon’s policy shop and the OSP, instead of digging into Richard Perle’s friends David Wurmser and Mike Maloof (who founded OSP’s precursor) and so on, the media got lost. There hasn’t been a single important investigation of the OSP by a major media outlet in months, and (as far as I can remember) not even a recap! It’s like all the lies never happened.

So now Bush can blame the CIA, and George Tenet, for having given him bad intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, and say that at least the world is rid of a bad guy.

Once the lies are off the table, all Kerry can do is to point out how badly things are going. Bush slips away, at least until historians unravel this.

It’s a shame.