Bush still in denial re Iraq threat

January 28, 2004 | Print Now

1. Bush Claims to Never Say Iraq Was "Imminent Threat"
   
   Facing mounting pressure over charges that the White House deliberately misled the American people about Iraq's WMD, President Bush is now claiming that U.N. weapons inspectors were not allowed into Iraq before the war. Yesterday, the president said, Iraq "chose defiance. It was [Saddam's] choice to make, and he did not let us in."1
   
   But U.N. weapons inspections led by Hans Blix began on November 27th, 2003, as noted by the State Department at the time.2 Over the course of the next five months, those inspections found "little more than 'debris'" from a WMD program that had long since been destroyed.3 The weapons inspectors were forced to leave when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq.4 President Bush then "refused to permit the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq."5
   
   When asked about the issue yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan claimed the entire WMD issue was unimportant because the Bush Administration had never said Iraq was a threat. He said, "the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent'" to describe the Iraqi "threat" - not the Bush Administration.6
   
   But the record shows the Administration repeatedly said Iraq was an "imminent threat." On May 7th, less than a week after the president announced the end of major combat operations, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked, "Didn't we go to war because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the U.S.?" He replied, "Absolutely."7Similarly, in November 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?" Most notably, Vice President Cheney said two days after President Bush's 2003 State of the Union that Saddam Hussein "threatens the United States of America."8
   
   Sources:
   
2. President Bush Welcomes President Kwasniewski to White House , 01/27/2004.
   
3. "Weapons Inspections to Begin in Iraq November 27", US State Department, 11/25/2002.
   
4. "Blix Downgrades Prewar Assessment of Iraqi Weapons", Washington Post, 11/22/2003.
   
5. "Weapons Inspectors Leave Iraq", CBS News, 03/18/2003.
   
6. "Bush bars UN weapons teams from Iraq", SMH, 04/24/2003.
   
7. Press Briefing, 01/27/2004.
   
8. Press Briefing, 05/07/2003.
   
9. "Confronting Iraq Crucial To War Against Terror", Truth News, 01/30/2003.

[Uli]

The other day I watched a press conference where Bush sed that whilest all these intelligence services gathered information it became clear that Saddam was a gathering threat.

[Monte Smith]

I can't be confident this is the (aptly named) Daily Mislead until Ron posts it.

[willy]

If Bush is denying he said it then he is lying. What I don't understand is how everybody else in the free world, including Clinton and his cheering section on the left in the House and the Senate, said the same thing from 1998 until at least early last year. Yet, nobody mentions this at all (I realize that an election is coming up and this is pure politics, but geez). BTW-The fact that nobody in the mainstream media remembers the left saying Saddam had to go and doesn't bring it up at all is just another example of media bias.

Wesley Clark testified in the House or Senate at the end of 2002 claiming that Saddam was a threat that had to be dealt with. Clinton was about the only one on the left who came out in defense of Bush. Clinton still maintains that Saddam was a threat that had to be dealt with.

So, only Bush was lying about the threat of Saddam? All the others were sincere, just misinformed? Or, did everyone in the free world get it wrong? Does everyone here have a memory that only dates back to the most recent hate-filled column by Maureen Dowd?

Just curious.

[Ron Thorne]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
I can't be confident this is the (aptly named) Daily Mislead until Ron posts it.

How thoroughly predictable, Monte.

I'm anxious to observe your refutation of any one of numerous sources/footnotes which accompany each and every DAILY MIS-LEAD.

Go nuts!

[crawjo]

Okay, I don't see anything in the article that shows that Bush said Hussein was an "imminent" threat. Ari Fleischer affirming a question that a reporter asked him is not much evidence at all, and certainly says nothing of the way the administration presented the case. Rumsfeld's quote is about the impossibility of knowing when something is imminent, but it doesn't say anywhere that Iraq was an imminent threat. And yes, Bush and Cheney said and continue to say that Hussein was a threat to the United States. They just didn't use the word imminent. That is something that the press started using, but it wasn't the administration that gave them that word.

[crawjo]

In fact, in his 2003 SOTU, Bush specifically said that when the threat was imminent, it was too late, that we couldn't wait that long.

Again (because this has come up on several occasions), if 45 minutes is not imminent, I don't know what would be. Some say that the 45 minute claim came from Tony Blair, so we can't blame the Bush people, but why--if they did not agree--did the Bush people say nothing. Tacit silence is not excusable when so many lives are at stake.