Some lies are slow to die.
Take for example the lie that President George W. Bush “Lied the United States into War with Iraq” more frequently presented as “Bush Lied.”
Wikileaks And The Great Saddam WMD Scam
by James Dunnigan
Strategy PageWikileaks documents continue to surface. Some of the latest ones cover the Iraqi chemical weapons program after 1991. In particular these documents deal with the evidence of chemical weapons U.S. troops found in Iraq after 2003. This is all part of an ongoing, largely ideological, media battle over exactly what happened to Iraqi chemical weapons after 1991. Up until early 2003, the conventional wisdom was that Saddam had chemical weapons, and just would not give them up. Some thought Saddam’s strategy was dumb. All he had to do was let the UN inspectors do their job and get Iraqi out from under the embargo. All Saddam had to do was destroy all his chemical weapons and proved to the UN. He could easily reconstitute his chemical weapons later.
What no one brought up was what Saddam was actually doing. He was pretending to have chemical weapons in order to keep the Iranians at bay. Horrendous casualties from Iraqi chemical weapons had forced the Iranians to end the 1980s war in an ignominious (for the Iranians) draw. In 2003 the Iranians still wanted Saddam’s head on a pike, and Saddam saw his imaginary chemical weapons as a primary defense against Iranian attack.
This deception was not revealed until after Saddam was out of power and some of his key aides could talk. Saddam kept the real situation (no real chemical weapons programs) secret even from most of his closest aides and military commanders. Saddam trusted very few people. His deception worked, but got him killed anyway because the scheme backfired. Because the rest of the world (especially the United States) believed Saddam still had chemical weapons program and some of those weapons were liable to be given to al Qaeda (which Saddam was in contact with). After September 11, 2001 Saddam seemed like the only leader in the region crazy enough to continue supporting al Qaeda. Officially al Qaeda wanted Saddam gone but in reality Saddam had something of an understanding with al Qaeda (as did many Moslem government.) Saddam would let al Qaeda men quietly travel through Iraq and use Iraq as a hideout as long as there were no active operations against Saddam. Iraq had arrangements like this with many terror groups even though both sides knew that eventually these ceasefires would have to be broken. The U.S. also knew that Saddam was publicly calling for terror attacks on the United States and hailing the 911 attacks as a great victory for Moslems.
So whenever you run across someone insisting “Bush Lied” just point and laugh…
