Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [23]
The Bush administration engaged in fearmongering before the United States attacked Iraq on March 19, 2003. There is no question that the president and his principal advisors sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous threat who had to be removed from office sooner rather than later. At the same time, they understood that there was not much enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the broader public. Moreover, the American military, the intelligence community, the State Department, and the U.S. Congress were not keen for war. To overcome this reluctance to attack Iraq, the Bush administration engaged in a deception campaign to inflate the threat posed by Saddam. It involved spinning, concealing, and lying to the American people. I will describe four key lies.
First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on September 27, 2002 that he had “bulletproof” evidence that Saddam was closely allied with Osama bin Laden.19 In fact, he had no such evidence, which he admitted on October 4, 2004, when he told the Council on Foreign Relations, “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”20 Similarly, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who claimed before the war that bin Laden was in “partnership with Iraq” and that there was a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network,” admitted in January 2004: “I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did.”21
The Bush administration actually had solid evidence before the war that Saddam and bin Laden were not working together. As noted, two high-level Al Qaeda operatives captured after September 11 independently told their interrogators that there was no link between the two. Moreover, neither the CIA nor the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could find conclusive evidence of a meaningful link between bin Laden and Saddam before the United States invaded Iraq.22 Nor was the 9/11 Commission able to uncover evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between those two leaders.23
Second, the architects of the war often claimed that the United States knew with absolute certainty that Iraq had particular WMD capabilities, when, in fact, that was not true. There were, of course, good reasons to suspect that Saddam might have chemical and biological weapons, but there was no direct evidence that he possessed those capabilities. Indeed, when Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks briefed Bush on September 6, 2002, Franks said, “Mr. President, we’ve been looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for ten years and haven’t found any yet, so I can’t tell you that I know that there are any specific weapons anywhere. I haven’t seen Scud one.”24 Nor did the intelligence agencies have hard evidence that Iraq possessed WMD.25 Moreover, the UN weapons inspectors were unable to find any evidence of WMD between November 2002 and March 2003, despite having the freedom to look anywhere they wanted inside Iraq. And, of course, if the U.S. government knew where those weapons were, they could have alerted the UN inspectors and helped them find the WMD.
Despite this lack of hard evidence, Vice President Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in late August 2002 that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”26 Secretary of State Powell said one month later that “there is no doubt he has chemical weapons stocks.”27 On February 5, 2003, he told the UN, “There can be no doubt