No Lie

By Peter Roff

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

For a lot of people, especially those inside the Washington Beltway who are curious about the internecine goings on that accompany the formulation of policy in administrations of both parties, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward is often the authoritative last word. He's turned up a lot of "scoops" going back to the administration of President Richard M. Nixon who he, along with then-writing partner Carl Bernstein, did more to drive from office in disgrace than just about anyone.

Like him or not – and there are plenty who don't – he's got the scalps on his belt to prove he knows what he's doing.

His latest bit of journalism isn't likely to win him any more friends on the left, as he's just knocked down a revered piece of conventional wisdom that will force a reassessment of George W. Bush's presidency. For according to Woodward, there's no evidence the 43rd president of the United States "lied" the nation into war.

Bush's political opponents like to make this claim to delegitimize not just the war but his entire presidency. No man who knowingly and dishonestly took a nation to war is worthy of any kind of honor, hence history's reluctance to focus on the substantive accomplishments of President Lyndon Johnson. Whatever good he did is eclipsed by his use of a fabricated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to secure congressional authority to increase the number of combat troops being sent to South Vietnam. The notion that Bush lied in similar fashion about Iraq discredits – in the eyes of his political opponents certainly – everything he did, everything he stood for and everything he accomplished.

It's a brutal axe but, according to Woodward, one that is itself based on an untruth. An argument could certainly and persuasively be made, he told moderator Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," that the Iraq War was a mistake, but "there was no lying in this that I could find."

According to Woodward, Bush himself was skeptical about the presence of weapons of mass destruction and urged caution on then-CIA Director George Tenet lest he stretch the case that there were.

The whole thing of course exploded after Bush, in a speech to Congress, asserted that foreign intelligence sources had shared with the U.S. information that Saddam Hussein's regime had attempted to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger, a country in the African Sahara, only to have former U.S. Amb. Joe Wilson claim he had investigated the claim and found it wanting, as he said in The New York Times in a piece called "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

That Wilson's investigation was hardly thorough enough to be called the last word on the matter was soon lost in the rising storm over the claim that someone in the White House (it later turned out to be the No. 2 man at the U.S. Department of State) had, in pushing back on what Wilson was saying, told at least one reporter that Wilson's wife (who went professionally by the name Valerie Plame) was a covert CIA employee.

For a time the whole business made celebrities out of Wilson and his wife among Democrats, the left-wing intelligensia and the Hollywood crowd. And it made goats out of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others who asserted that Hussein's drive to obtain weapons of mass destruction – in violation of the cease fire agreement that ended 1991's Gulf War – rendered him a global threat that needed to be dealt with harshly and severely.

Woodward's already being bashed for letting this little bit of truth out into the open. Esquire magazine is already up with a post questioning his integrity and saying he sounds like "someone waiting for that check from a Nigerian price to clear." More of the same is coming. Too many people have too much invested in the idea that Bush lied to allow the debate to start up again on the chance that they were wrong. It won't change what happened if those people were in fact wrong, any more than it will change any of the outcomes; what it will do is generate some confusion about who wears the white hats and who wears the black ones, which is not what the progressive Democrats – who are still reeling from President Barack Obama's foreign policy failures – need right now. After all, if Bush didn't lie, how can it be his fault that the Islamic State group continues to gain ground in Iraq now that Obama has pulled almost all the troops out of there?