Before a friendly audience in Fresno on Tuesday, Karl Rove, former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, continued his campaign to rewrite history about whether Bush misled the country about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Now Rove claims Bush led the nation into war on the basis of the same intelligence that Democrats saw when they decided to support the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Rove, the master of political spin, is using his book tour to confuse the public about what occurred in the Bush White House as operatives ramped up public opinion in favor of invading Iraq seven years ago. Weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq, and now Bush loyalists are trying to explain their way out of the administration’s decision to lead us into war.
But Rove’s utterances shouldn’t go unchallenged when they are at odds with the facts. The nation must understand what happened as we charged into war in Iraq, and Rove’s revisionism isn’t offering clarity to the discussion.
Rove spoke at a fundraiser Tuesday for Fresno County Supervisor Debbie Poochigian and was also touting his book, “Courage and Consequence.” In his Fresno speech, Rove said that if Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, so did Democrats who saw the same intelligence as Bush and reached the same conclusion. That’s just absurd.
The Democrats – and the rest of the nation – saw the intelligence information on Iraq that had been manipulated by the Bush administration.
This intelligence didn’t stand on its own, but came with the administration’s political campaign about WMDs. It had a predetermined goal of invading Iraq.
It would be one thing if the Bush administration had simply offered flawed intelligence and the nation’s leaders then made unwise decisions based on that that bad information. But it was much worse than that. The faulty intelligence on Iraq was then whipped up by the Bush White House, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, as a pretense to invade Iraq.
Later, after the war was in full bloom and it was clear to everyone there never were any weapons of mass destruction, Rove, Cheney and company continued to change the purported reasons for invading Iraq. The new, improved rationale included “removing a dictator” and “spreading freedom.” These “reasons” were not stated when the administration initially sold the war to Congress.
Instead, we were led to believe Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to world peace because he either possessed or was developing nuclear weapons. We now know that the Bush administration chose to ignore evidence that questioned or refuted such claims.
A version of this editorial originally appeared in the Fresno Bee.