The New York Times published an amazing story last night on the U.S. and Iraqi troops who discovered and were wounded by old and inoperable chemical weapons over the course of the Iraq war. In some cases, shoddy disposal tactics resulted in soldiers suffering injuries after being exposed to active chemical agents still inside the corroding munitions. The Pentagon withheld information about the weapons from soldiers on the front line, kept military doctors in the dark, and generally did everything it could to “suppress knowledge” about the injuries to U.S. personnel. It’s a remarkable piece of journalism.
But for many conservatives, the real news broken by the Times is that BUSH WAS RIGHT ABOUT IRAQ.
[embedtweet id="522233526604038144"]
[embedtweet id="522227864905981952"]
It’s incredible that I have to write this sentence in October 2014, but here it goes. No, George W. Bush was not right about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, I know what you’re going say. “But look! The Times says they found WMDs in Iraq! The liberal media was wrong! Bush was right!” No, Bush was still very wrong. Very, very wrong.
Before we get into the actual reasons for why this doesn’t vindicate Bush, let’s think about this logically for moment. If the presence of these weapons proved Bush correct, then it stands to reason that the Bush administration would have come out at some point and said “hey, look at these weapons, we got it right.” But they never did that. They knew the weapons were there, and they had many years to wave them around as proof positive that they didn’t get many thousands of people killed based on false information, so why didn’t they do it?
The reason is very simple, and the Times report conservatives are claiming vindicates Bush actually explains very clearly why it does no such thing: “The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.” Many of the weapons, according to the Times, “appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.”
The discovery of old, degraded chemical munitions in Iraq is not news. The Bush administration went to war expecting to find older weapons, along with a thriving new chemical weapons program (that didn’t exist). Ten years ago, the final report of the weapons inspectors sent to find Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (commonly known as the Duelfer Report) was released, and it noted that “a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered” in the country, but that Iraq had not produced any new weapons.
Back in the summer of 2006, Rick Santorum was on his way to losing his Senate seat and needed a “game changer” to save his political career. So he threw together a press conference to triumphantly announce: “We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons.” He was talking about “500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988,” according to the Washington Post.
Everyone laughed at him, not just for how transparently desperate the stunt was, but also because Bush administration said Santorum was wrong. I’ll repeat that, so there’s no confusion – Bush administration officials said that the presence of ancient chemical weapons in Iraq did not vindicate George W. Bush’s case for war:
But defense officials said Thursday that the weapons were not considered likely to be dangerous because of their age, which they determined to be pre-1991.
Pentagon officials told NBC News that the munitions are the same kind of ordnance the U.S. military has been gathering in Iraq for the past several years, and "not the WMD we were looking for when we went in this time."
There you have it. If the word of the Bush administration isn’t enough to convince you that Bush was not right about chemical weapons in Iraq, then I’m not sure what will. And the Times report, far from vindicating George W. Bush, is actually just further proof of the gross political manipulation that lay at the heart of the disastrous conflict he started.
Shares