Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq?

Abstract

President Bush has been accused by some in the popular press of lying in his arguments for taking the United States to war with Iraq in 2003. This article examines several sets of statements by President Bush and his administration: first, about the implication that there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11; second, about Iraq's nuclear weapons capacity; and third, about Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons and his ability to deliver them. Although the record at this early date is far from complete, the article concludes that from publicly available evidence, the president misled the country in important ways, potentially undermining the trust of the citizenry.

Der Irakkrieg 2003

“…So war es zum Beispiel Cheney, der in seiner Rede vor Kriegsveteranen im August 2002 die vermeintliche Bestätigung des irakischen Atomprogramms verkündete, obwohl der offizielle Evaluierungsprozess darüber noch gar nicht zu einem Ergebnis gekommen war (Woodward, 2004, 442). Dazu kommt, dass laut Pfiffner (2004, 204) und Badie (2010 erheblicher Druck auf Analysten mit abweichenden Meinungen ausgeübt bzw. versucht wurde, deren Glaubwürdigkeit zu diskreditieren (Hersh, 2005, 211).…”

The Perfect Intelligence Failure? U.S. Pre‐War Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction

“…There seems no doubt as to the scale of the intelligence failure over Iraq. From President Bush's January 2002 State of the Union message proclaiming the existence of an "axis of evil," administration officials sought to prepare the American public for a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power by emphasizing three claims: (1) the threat posed by Iraqi WMD; (2) the risk that nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons technology could be passed to terrorists; and (3) a link between Saddam and the events of 9/11, which a high proportion of the American public came to believe despite the absence of supporting evidence (Feldmann 2003Mann 2004Milbank and Deane 2003;Pfiffner 2004). Thus, in a speech at West Point in June 2002, President Bush asserted that "[c]ontainment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies" (Bush 2002a).…”

Presidential Decision Making: Rationality, Advisory Systems, and Personality

“…The neutral broker role and its variants are taken up by John Burke in this issue, and have been analyzed with respect to the assistant to the president for national security affairs by I. M. Destler (1972Destler ( , 1981 and Mulcahy and Crabb (1991), among others. It has also been used to analyze different approaches to the office of chief of staff to the president (Pfiffner 1999). If the top staffer does not carefully play the neutral broker role but becomes a policy advocate, the burden shifts to the president to assure that all legitimate perspectives are well represented.…”

“…In the post-World War II era, the many offices of the presidency have grown to the point that some scholars (Polsby 1983;Hart 1987Hart , 1995 have characterized it as the "presidential branch" in which the White House Office and Executive Office of the President often have different interests than the rest of the executive branch. Broader perspectives on the institutional presidency have been provided by Burke (2000), Walcott and Hult (1995), Hult and Walcott (2004), and Pfiffner (2005), among others. These approaches emphasize the effects of large, complex organizations on presidential options and decisions.…”

“…In accomplishing his goal of taking the United States to war in Iraq, President Bush very skillfully used his leverage as president to convince Congress and the American people that war against Saddam Hussein was essential to the national security of the United States (Pfiffner 2004a). In doing this, he effectively overcame the serious reservations of Secretary of State Colin Powell, a significant portion of the professional Army Officer Corps (as articulated by retired officers and leaks to the press), and of U.S. allies, and even public objections from his father's advisors, Brent Scowcroft and James A. Baker, not to mention opposition from a number of Democratic members of Congress (Pfiffner 2004b).…”