6-20-05, 10:50 am

Do you ever get the feeling that we can’t get a straight story out of the Bush administration?

In remarks during his radio address yesterday, Bush seemed to backtrack on his rationale for war by stating that the reason the US went to war in Iraq was because the US was attacked on September 11th. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said earlier last week that the war was justified because people from the region had attacked the US on September 11th.

Despite the apparent confusion by the administration about who committed the terrorist attacks on 9/11, up to this week, the administration denied that it had ever argued that Iraq was linked to or behind the September 11th attacks.

This new line is part of a public relations campaign designed to shore up plummeting public opinion, which fell to only 36% of Americans supporting maintaining the occupation.

Further Bush’s PR effort is meant to avert fallout from recently leaked British government documents, including the Downing Street Memo, written between March 2002 and July 2002 that say the administration was 'fixing the facts' around an invasion policy they were determined to carry out. The British documents show that British officials believed that Bush was intent on attacking Iraq well before he had made a case to the public or to Congress.

The documents describe the President’s case of war to be 'thin' and lacking credibility. British officials believed that other countries posed a greater threat. They found the administration’s 'evidence' that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda to be nothing more than conjecture and that the administration understood this.

One administration official even asked if the British had more intelligence on alleged Al Qaeda meetings with Iraqi agents. The British didn’t, of course.

The documents say that Bush’s real reason was 'regime change,' a patently illegal basis for war and one the British government could not support. To this they added that the Bush administration seemed to have a grudge with Saddam and to have 'unfinished business' from 1991.

They paint a picture of an administration that was intent on going to war with Iraq and using every available tool at its disposable to convince Congress and the public that it was justified, despite possessing clear knowledge of the flimsiness of their case.

A growing movement in the public and Congress is calling for a thorough investigation into what the administration knew about Iraq and whether or not it manipulated intelligence to help start the war.

(Read the memos at .)

Much of the analysis presents a picture of a public relations campaign emphasizing Iraq’s threat that the administration eventually implemented in the late summer and fall of 2003.

During the period before the Iraq war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq posed a 'grave and gathering threat,' to use Bush’s words, because they possessed WMD and they had strong and working ties to Al Qaeda.

Several Bush administration officials, including the President, implied that Iraq was making nuclear weapons.

The administration said that Iraq was fostering terrorist organizations like the ones that attacked the US on September 11th.

Bush himself argued that Iraq was responsible for the attack on September 11th in – one of many examples of how administration officials fudged the link – a February 2001 speech at the Congress of Tomorrow: 'Prior to September the 11th, there was apparently no connection between a place like Iraq and terror. Oh, sure, he had run some terrorist networks out of his country, and that was of concern to us. But it was very difficult to link a terrorist network and Saddam Hussein to the American soil. As a matter of fact, it was very difficult to link any attack on the American soil, because prior to September the 11th, we were confident that two oceans could protect us from harm.' After the war began, it became clear that what UN weapons inspectors has said all along was correct: that the inspections did work and Iraq’s WMD had all been destroyed. The public soon came to learn, what the administration knew all along, that the evidence for Iraq’s ties to Al Qaeda was speculative at best.

Additionally, the claim that Iraq possessed or was trying to acquire a means to build nuclear weapons was based on a known forgery provoked criticism of the administration’s effort to fabricate facts and manipulate them to build public and Congressional support for his invasion plans.

The administration’s lies about the threat Iraq posed prompted Democrats during the 2004 election campaign to claim that President Bush had forgotten that Osama Bin Laden ordered the attacks on 9/11 and that the invasion of Iraq was a cover for its failure to catch Bin Laden.

As a result, throughout the election campaign, the Bush people insisted they never claimed that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 or that Iraq had more than fleeting exchanges with some people later tied to Al Qaeda. In fact, they said, that no WMD were found in Iraq was not an important issue, it was the mere idea that it might have possible that justified war.



Government sources say that 1,715 US soldiers have died in Iraq; over 18,000 have been evacuated due to wounds, injuries, or illness; as many as 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.



--Reach Martha Kramer at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.