Every September 11, former White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer goes on Twitter, for reasons he almost certainly can’t understand, to tweet his minute-by-minute recollection of the terrorist attack that George W. Bush had been too lazy to read the briefings warning him about and which caused the president to seize up in confusion and panic, unable to put down the children’s book he was reading, until he fled and hid in a protected location while Lower Manhattan crumbled and burned. In some unexamined part of himself, Fleischer evidently senses that his professional skill set—based on telling whatever transitory lie was good enough to get through a news cycle—is not adequate to the historical enormity. Some things won’t go away.
Last night, Fleischer followed the same compulsion, this time for the 16th anniversary of Bush’s invasion of Iraq:
The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed “Bush lied. People died.” This accusation itself is a lie. It’s time to put it to rest.
He went on to argue, or to state as if it were an argument, that “President Bush (and I as press secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded” and, quoting the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, that the fact that although the intelligence community had been wrong about everything, in a way that had perfectly matched what the Bush administration wanted to say to justify the invasion, “analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.” (Rather than “political pressure,” in this account, the analysts were led astray by “pervasive conventional wisdom,” a distinction that, like the WMD themselves, collapses into nonexistence under scrutiny.)
The real responsibility for the United States invading Iraq, Fleischer wrote, belonged to Saddam Hussein:
[T]here was a liar and his name was Saddam Hussein. He created an elaborate system of lies to fool western intelligence services and he succeeded. He wanted us to believe he had WMDs.
Sixteen years after the fact, Ari Fleischer was placing the blame for the invasion of Iraq exactly where he and his president had placed it to begin with. Back then, the story was that Saddam Hussein had deserved to be overthrown because he was concealing the fact that he had weapons of mass destruction; now, it’s that Saddam deserved to be overthrown because he was concealing the fact that he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The existence or nonexistence of weapons of mass destruction, that is, made no difference to the question of whether Bush was going to invade Iraq.
This was not the moral Ari Fleischer wanted to attach to the story. He wanted the moral to be what he started with, which he repeated near the end of the 22-tweet barrage:
The allegaton [sic] that “Bush lied. People died” is a liberal myth created to politically target President Bush. I understand the anger that was felt after no WMDs were found.
What went wrong in Iraq was that people ended up saying mean things about George W. Bush and Ari Fleischer.
Despite typing “People died” twice, Fleischer betrayed no interest in that part of the slogan. At no point did he mention the human toll of the war, the thousands of dead U.S. troops and the uncounted and uncountable hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. What went wrong in Iraq was that people ended up saying mean things about George W. Bush and Ari Fleischer. “Died” was just there to rhyme with “lied,” and Fleischer urgently wanted to say that he had not lied.
He had, of course. The invasion of Iraq was based on nothing but lies. Fleischer was still lying, pretending that the only question of truth that had mattered in 2003 was whether or not he and the administration had accurately presented the findings of the United States intelligence community.
Whatever the United States intelligence community believed or said it believed, and for whatever reason, was not the only available information about the question of Iraqi WMD back in 2003. There was Hans Blix, the United Nations weapons inspector, whose team was on the ground in Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction and not finding them and saying so, even as the Bush Administration insisted the evidence was overwhelming.
In 2019, Ari Fleischer didn’t mention Hans Blix. Sixteen years ago, he knew who he was and what he was reporting. In January 2003, Blix said, “In the course of these inspections we have not found any smoking gun.”
Ari Fleischer, speaking for the Bush White House, responded: “The problem with guns that are hidden is you can’t see their smoke. We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
We know for a fact that there are weapons there, Ari Fleischer said, lying.
We know for a fact that there are weapons there, Ari Fleischer said, lying.
By March, with the invasion 13 days away, Fleischer was treating Blix’s lack of evidence as a pressing reason to invade:
But probably the most troublesome of all is as Dr. Blix reported, that there are a series of question marks on which they are not yet clear. The problem is that these questions marks–is these question marks involve VX, sarin, nerve gas, botulin, anthrax. These are question marks that can kill the American people. That’s the problem with these question marks. There should be no room for question marks. There should have been immediate, full disarmament
This was the heart of the lie about the invasion: that it was necessary, in March of 2003, for the United States to invade Iraq. That Saddam Hussein represented not a theoretical danger to the American people, but an urgent crisis, which required urgent military action. That Iraq unquestionably had (for a fact) an active arsenal of chemical weapons, and might be closing in on possessing nuclear ones. That the regime was actively collaborating with al Qaeda, so that those weapons might strike on our soil at any moment, unless Saddam was overthrown by military force, immediately. That this risk was so real and so urgent, we would have to invade Iraq even while we were already busy invading Afghanistan, where no great power had ever successfully worked its will through force. That the risk was so real and so urgent, we would have to invade and overthrow the Iraqi regime before coming up with any plan for what to replace it with, or even any plan for how we might stabilize the government and society while we and the Iraqis figured out a plan.
The lie was that anyone in the Bush White House could be trusted—trusted to tell the truth, trusted to know what they were doing, trusted to know how to do it. This was the lie that Ari Fleischer went out to lie about back then, day after day. He is still lying about it now. And the people are all still dead.
