[This article has been published in Restoring America to highlight the importance of American leadership abroad.]
Speaking in Dallas about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, President George W. Bush made a Freudian slip. It was the “decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq,” former president George W. Bush said Wednesday before correcting himself to say Ukraine.
Reaction from partisans was quick and brutal. They called Bush a war criminal, declared the Iraq war illegal, and declared Bush responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.
All points miss the mark.
First, Bush did not lie; the intelligence was wrong. The reason was that signals intelligence like phone intercepts affirmed the human intelligence gathered by the intelligence community. CIA and DIA polygraphs of defectors can only determine deception, not truth. If Saddam Hussein bluffed, defectors would believe information that was false while Iraqi officials in Baghdad would chatter about it, also believing it true. The true politicization of intelligence came after few weapons of mass destruction turned up when various Washington bureaucracies scrambled to exculpate their responsibility while too many journalists embraced partisan narratives that made good headlines and generated clicks but never passed the smell test.
Second, Bush was not solely responsible for the decision. The majority of congressmen and senators voted in favor of military action as they were operating from the same bad intelligence as the White House.
Third, the Iraq war was not illegal. Bush based his action on pre-existing Chapter VII UN Security Council resolutions from 13 years before, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War when Saddam did truly hide a covert nuclear program after his own son-in-law defected to Jordan with a treasure trove of documents. To call the war illegal is to create expiration dates for every existing Chapter VII resolution, a precedent that could lead to an immediate end to the UN mission separating North and South Korea.
Finally, while many Iraqis died in the war, beware of the passive voice. The vast majority of Iraqis killed — the hundreds of thousands pundits so readily throw about — died at the hands of insurgent bombs or Iranian-backed militias. True, that pressure cooker may never have exploded had Bush not launched the war but, then again, Syria shows it might have. The point is that blaming Bush for those deaths, when American forces and their Iraqi allies were trying to protect Iraqis and end the sectarian strife, exculpates those who actually staked out schools and markets to place bombs that might maximize casualties. Unfortunately, the irony here is that the current White House — by lifting, waiving, or simply not enforcing many sanctions on Iran — is rewarding the very forces who were culpable of war crimes.
Politics in Washington is a blood sport, but accuracy matters. The United States was, is, and remains a force for good in the world. Bush is no Putin or Khamenei. Nor, for that matter, is the United States in any way like Russia or Iran.
This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.
