The leftwingnut Bushophobic Iraq War re-litigators are NOT gonna be happy with this.
I hope Bob Woodward is prepared to be consigned to the wailing and gnashing of teeth that await him in The Outer Darkness:
Former President George W. Bush did not lie about the presence of weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq War, journalist Bob Woodward said Sunday.
The argument has been used for years by Democrats and other detractors, but Woodward said on Fox News Sunday that his own eighteen-month investigation showed that Bush was actually skeptical that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had WMDs as Saddam claimed.
Though plenty of mistakes were made in the invasion of Iraq, Bush actually told CIA Director George Tenet, "Don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD," Woodward said....
Though it can be argued the war was a mistake, Woodward told host Chris Wallace, "there was no lie in this that I could find."
Reality is never as "Narrative"-driven as leftwingnut zealots insist. And in reality, logic and common sense are rather stubborn things.
You're the POTUS. Your country has been massively and asymmetrically attacked on its own soil, slaughtering several thousand civilians. Enemy countries that support the jihadist attackers have, by the best available information from not just your intelligence agencies, but every allied intelligence agency in the world, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and are working on developing nuclear weapons capability. The time for "diplomacy" and half-measures and playing paddy-cake have ended if you don't want to start seeing your own people systematically gassed, drowned in plague, or perish in atomic flames.
Remember, you're the Commander-In-Chief. In those circumstances, what, as a responsible leader who takes his/her constitutional responsibilities seriously, do you do? You attack. You invade Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban. You invade Iraq as both an enemy terror-sponsoring regime and a geostrategic staging area for the invasion and eradication of both neighboring jihadist regimes and consign them, and jihadism itself, to the, well, "Outer Darkness" of weak-horse-ism forever.
The mistake President Bush43 made was in stopping short of that follow-through. If he'd wiped out Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian mullahgarchy in one swift, powerful blow when he had the chance, the Islamic State and the specter of Iranian nuclear Armageddon would never have existed.
What's that expression? "Strike while the iron's hot".
But getting back to the best intel available at the time the decision to invade had to be made, and the context in which it unfolded, if that intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein did not have any WMDs, do you go ahead and invade anyway? Maybe you do, maybe you don't - I would have - but if you give the green light, you do not include WMDs among the justifications for doing so - and remember that Dubya had a plethora of reasons besides WMDs. What would you gain from citing WMDs that didn't exist? It's not like that lack wouldn't become known after the fact. You'd be sabotaging everything you were trying to accomplish to ensure the security and safety of U.S. vital interests and the American homeland. It would be retarded.
But, in fact, Saddam did have WMDs, both in-country (as was eventually discovered after the "Bush lied!!!!" lie had become entrenched beyond reason) and stashed across the border in Assad's Syria - the latter for which the Bush Administration foolishly provided Saddam six months by going back to the UN and its little white "weapons inspector" trucklets put-putting everywhere he would allow them to look, which wasn't much, instead of attacking in late 2002 as we were poised to do. That was Dubya's other big mistake.
Point being, Bush not only didn't lie, but he couldn't have, because you can't "lie" about something you do not know. All he could do is make the best decision he could with the intelligence he had. And he decided not to gamble more American lives by "giving diplomacy" a chance when the lesson of the consequences of doing so were still assuming room temperature in Manhattan and D.C. morgues.
George W. Bush made the right decision.
And while he did make subsequent mistakes, as outlined above, the consequences we suffer today could also have been averted by his successor:
As for Barack Obama's decision to leave no residual force behind when American troops left Iraq in December 2011, Woodward indicated it would have been better to have left 10,000-15,000 troops behind as "an insurance policy" as military commanders suggested.
"We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still, 65 years or so after the war," Woodward said. "When you’re a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies, and he didn’t in this case.
If O doesn't deliberately throw away the victory President Bush did win, there is no Islamic State today, and Iran wouldn't also be overrunning the Middle East. And he most definitely has done so dishonestly.
"Obama lied, everyone died".
Has a bitterly ironic ring to it, doesn't it?
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