While the worst president in American history continues his robust program of golfing and covering up crimes, the crew surrounding the second-worst president in American history keeps up its efforts to promote itself as, while perhaps not the brightest bunch to guide the nation, at the very least Not War Criminals.
It remains a tough sell. The George W. Bush White House instituted a government-sponsored program for the torture of war prisoners. The George W. Bush White House unleashed a war of choice—and truly, there is little dispute about that particular point—that killed between 150,000 and a half-million people. And the George W. Bush White House very specifically engaged in a campaign to sell the Iraq War based on an intentional misreading, and unsupportable embellishments, of national intelligence assessments. We did not go to Iraq to “liberate” anyone; we went there, according to George W. Bush and his assembled foreign policy team, because the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass murder to be unleashed upon us if we didn’t.
Bush press secretary and flagrant liar Ari Fleischer (Trump wasn’t the first Republican president to hire a press team willing to bend the truth in front of a roomful of cameras) can pipe up with all the Twitter threads he likes, but he’s going to get slammed back down again every time by busybodies piping up with the actual history as reported at the time. Sixteen years is not a millennium. The lost and ancient era of 2002-2003 is documented not by cave paintings or illuminated manuscripts, but by videotapes of people like Ari Fleischer dispensing words from their pie-holes on national television.
What follows Fleischer’s tweet is a thread once again supposing that, golly gee, it may have turned out in hindsight that our most celebrated pretense for leveling the nation of Iraq in a fit of neoconservative colonialism was false, but we couldn’t possibly have known that, and it was the intelligence services that done us wrong, not the Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush triumvirate of willful, bloody incompetence. And it is the same tendencious smoke-and-mirrors routine that the neoconservatives responsible for the catastrophe have each rolled out, both singly and as a movement, to explain why a war predicated on “weapons of mass destruction” found none, and why a war that would “pay for itself” while unleashing, supposedly, a wave of pro-American democracy over the Middle East turned out to cost trillions, have no identifiable exit path, and form the foundations of a new era of terrorism.