Someone did want war and lied for it

Feb.16, 2008

Someone did want war and lied for it

TOP US officials continue to deny that they made false statements in order to strengthen their case against Saddam Hussein the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as charged by the non-partisan Centre for Public Integrity. According to the centre, President George W Bush himself and senior Bush administration officials made 935 false statements about Iraq before the invasion. The realities on the ground in post-invasion Iraq have established the falsehood of the statements.
The latest Bush administration official to face a congressional grilling in this context was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has been accused of making 56 false statements on the "threat" posed by Saddam's Iraq.
The question was put to her by Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, who cited the report from the Centre for Public Integrity. He asked her: "This study has found that you, Madame Secretary, made 56 false statements to the American people where you repeatedly pump up the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and exaggerate the so-called relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."
Rice replied: "Congressman, I take my integrity very seriously and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false, or that I thought to be false, in order to pump up anything. Nobody wants to go to war."
Now, here is the catch. No one is casting any doubt on Rice's integrity. It is her assumption that "Nobody wants to go to war" that is being brought under question.
There is evidence that has established beyond any trace of doubt that there was and is a hardline camp in Washington which plotted the war against Iraq even before Bush entered the White House in January 2001. The best evidence is the strategy paper drawn up by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in mid-2000, not to mention the 1996 recommendations made to Israel by the pro-Israeli camp in Washington. In both cases, several of the key people involved went to become top-level positions in the Bush administration. It has also been made clear that one of their common priorities and immediate missions after assuming office in the administration was to build a case against Iraq and orchestrate a US invasion of that country. And they were successful in their mission as we are witnessing in Iraq today.
Surely, Rice, who served as national security adviser for Bush during the president's first term before becoming his secretary of state in the second term, should have known about the existence of the neocon project for war against Iraq. There were indeed people in the administration and outside who wanted to go to war. Rice, who admitted that many of the intelligence assessments on Iraq were wrong, might not have been one of those who wanted to go to war and might not have made any statement that she knew to be false, but that does not negate the truth that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was planned and executed with a one-track mind by the neocons and there was nothing in the world that would have made them stop in their tracks even it meant outright lying, which they did, not once but on many occasions.