Caught in his own lies.

PositionComment - Editorial

George Bush's Iraq scandal is not going away any time soon. His Administration lied six ways to Sunday to browbeat the American public into going along with the war. Now those lies have finally caught up with him, and he is hopelessly entangled in their web, even as he spins more strands.

With U.S. soldiers dying at the appalling rate of one a day in Iraq, those lies are unsustainable. They haunt surviving family members, and they indict our democratic system of checks and balances.

The lies, exaggerations, and distortions go way beyond the one in his State of the Union address about uranium from Africa, though that was a whopper.

There was the lie that the Administration believed Saddam already possessed nuclear weapons.

There was the exaggeration that Saddam had vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent," Bush said in his State of the Union address. Where is it all?

There was the lie that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda. When Bush was asked point-blank at his July 30 press conference about the links he had drawn between Al Qaeda and Saddam, all that Bush could say was, "It's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered." That just doesn't cut it.

There was the lie that Saddam's weapons presented a direct threat to the United States. Even CIA Director George Tenet said it was highly unlikely that Saddam would use them against the United States unless Washington invaded (and still he didn't use them).

There was the lie about aluminum tubes, which Condoleezza Rice said were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." Actually, many intelligence experts, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that the tubes were more likely to be used for artillery rockets.

There was the lie about Saddam's unmanned aircraft. On October 7, Bush warned the nation about a growing fleet of these aircraft that could be used "for missions against the United States." Turns out these aircraft were hardly formidable. They appear to be "made of balsa wood and duct tape, with two small propellers attached to what look like the engines of a weed whacker," the AP reported in March.

And there was the lie that the Administration exhausted all means to resolve the conflict peacefully. Anyone who watched the U.N. Security Council debate knows that the United States stymied efforts to bring more weapons inspectors on board and to allow Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei time to complete their work.

At his July 30...

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