Kennedy speaks out on Bush's lies about Iraq

Over two centuries ago, John Adams spoke eloquently about the need to let facts and evidence guide actions and policies. He said, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Listen to those words again, and you can hear John Adams speaking to us now about Iraq. "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

Tragically, in making the decision to go to war in Iraq, the Bush Administration allowed its wishes, its inclinations and its passions to alter the state of facts and the evidence of the threat we faced from Iraq.

Ted Kennedy's recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations is getting a lot of attention, as well it should. While no great feat of rhetoric, it is a wonderful litany of the lies, insinuations and misleading statements used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Kennedy deals with the misuse of intelligence, the lies about WMDs, the non-existant links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and he makes particularly good use of the list compiled by the Center for American Progress of all the instances where, despite their denials now that they ever said anything like it, the Bush administration referred to Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an "imminent threat."

[Update 3/15: Thomas Shaller, writing in The Gadflyer also points out Kennedy's debt to Billmon's Koufax Award-winning post about the administrations WMD lies.]

In the march to war, the President exaggerated the threat anyway. It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda justified immediate war.

Why would the Administration go to such lengths to go to war? Was it trying to change the subject from its failed economic policy, the corporate scandals, and its failed effort to capture Osama bin Laden? The only imminent threat was the November Congressional election. The politics of the election trumped the stubborn facts.

Kennedy concludes, saying:

The evidence so far leads to only one conclusion. What happened was not merely a failure of intelligence, but the result of manipulation and distortion of the intelligence and selective use of unreliable intelligence to justify a decision to go to war. The Administration had made up its mind, and would not let stubborn facts stand in the way.

[...]

America went to war in Iraq because President Bush insisted that nuclear weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein and his ties to Al Qaeda were too dangerous to ignore. Congress never would have voted to authorize the war if we had known the facts.

The Bush Administration is obviously digging in its heels against any further serious investigation of the reasons we went to war.

The Administration's highest priority is to prevent any more additional stubborn facts about this fateful issue from coming to light before the election in November.

This debate will go on anyway in Congress and in communities across the country. The most important decision any President makes is the decision on war or peace. No President who misleads the country on the need for war deserves to be reelected. A President who does so must be held accountable. The last thing our nation needs is a sign on the desk in the Oval Office in the White House that says, "The buck doesn't stop here any more."

[Thanks to Sistersara for the cite.]