The Big Lie About Bush’s Case For War
Time and again the left uses this argument against President Bush’s case for war in Iraq:
Bush invaded to find the WMD’s. There were no WMD’s so the war is a lie/unjustified/a mistake.
The problem is, of course, that WMD’s weren’t the only reason why we invaded, as Mona Charen points out:
This morning on C-SPAN 2, I heard a nice young historian spout the conventional wisdom about President Bush and the Iraq War. This particular interpretation is now totally uncontroversial – but it is false.
Elizabeth Borgwardt of Washington University told an audience that George W. Bush had urged the war in Iraq in order to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction and only later used democracy promotion as a post-hoc justification for the conflict.
There is little question that “the weapons” as President Bush typically referred to WMDs were a key concern. But it is highly misleading to say that they were the sole justification. . . .
It may have been impossibly idealistic and even naïve to entertain such hopes (though I don’t think so), but an ambitious freedom agenda was always a part of the justification for the Iraq War – and that’s something that everyone who argues the Bush “lied us into war” is purposely ignoring.
She’s got the links to prove it at the link.
Unfortunately, this misrepresentation of President Bush’s policies is so ingrained in conventional wisdom that it will soon join “Bush said Saddam was in on 9/11” as an anti-war argument from the left that so many people believe it may as well be the truth.














