'Five Lies' Excerpt: Bait and Switch

This excerpt from "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" is taken from the book's first chapter.

As presented to the American people by our president, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was an essential component of the “war on terror,” itself the linchpin of the vague, impossibly broad, and hyper-aggressive Bush doctrine that the president had formulated publicly in the days after 9/11.

At its root, these stratagems were supposed to make Americans safer, although Bush’s language – full of John Wayne colloquialisms like “smoke ’em out” and “hunt ’em down” – often seemed much more reminiscent of the exhortations of a vengeful jihadi cleric than that of a confident and protective patriarch, as he seemed to aspire to appear. After resounding military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, by late spring 2003, many in the White House were exuberant and willing to say off the record that the now-famous photo of Bush striding across the deck of an aircraft carrier in full Top Gun gear would be Exhibit #1 in the 2004 presidential campaign. As it turns out, they were celebrating too soon.

Much of what has ensued is now familiar ground for those who have been following current events, and all too obviously similar to previous colonial debacles: the confusing blend of spontaneous local opposition and disciplined guerrilla organizations, economic and political chaos, and a “checkpoint culture” of tense, dangerous engagements between foreign troops and native civilians that wears on both. Instead of making us look strong, we have exposed the limits of raw power to make history.

In his eloquent February 27, 2003 letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, diplomat John Brady Kiesling, who had served under four presidents, made a prescient warning about what lay beneath the White House’s hubris, as well as how it threatened the very United States leadership in global affairs it claimed to exemplify:

The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves . . .

We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.

This war was no gimme, however. There was considerable resistance outside of Washington to go to war without the cloak of United Nations cooperation and/or a broad coalition of real allies. And, as we have seen, even some powerful figures inside the Beltway, such as Scowcroft and Zinni, were publicly opposed to it.

To steer the United States into a preemptive war with a country 6,000 miles away, the Bush administration had to establish five key “facts” in the public’s mind as a precursor to deploying hundreds of thousands of troops and spending billions of dollars in the effort:

1. Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and/or Al Qaeda.

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