Last week, the New York Times published an article questioning on whether former President George W. Bush was actually correct about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that lead-up to the 2003 war that Iraq. While liberals criticized and accused Bush of lying about Iraq’s WMD’s, Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution stated on Tuesday that the liberal left should now forget its old slogan, “Bush lied, thousands died motto.”
As evidence continues to mount that Iraq indeed had WMD’s, Hanson stated that while Republicans wanted to forget about the supposed absence of WMD in great quantities in Iraq, the Democrats saw Republican defensiveness as key to their recovery in 2006 in which the Democrats took over the House and the Senate. Hanson further stated that by the time President Obama was elected, the WND issue had been battered to death, it became no longer a political weapon of the left.
Due to the twist of events where the radical Islamic terrorist group, ISIS has been found using WMD’s and the recent New York Times article, Hanson said, “So why all of a sudden is the New York Times strangely focused on old WMD stockpiles showing up in Iraq? Is the subtext perhaps that the rise of ISIS poses an existential threat in such a dangerous landscape and by extension offers an explanation for the current bombing? Or are we to be reminded that Bush stirred up a WMD hornets’ nest that Obama was forced to deal with? Or is the sudden interest intended to preempt the story now before we learn that ISIS routinely employs WMD against the Kurds? How strange that Iraq, WMD, bombing, and preemption reappear in the news, but now without the hysteria of the Bush era.”
“For the last two years, reports of WMD of some sort have popped up weekly in Syria and Iraq, “said Hanson. “Bashar Assad has used them, apparently with strategic profit, both in deterring his enemies and in embarrassing the red lines of Barack Obama, who had threatened to bomb him if he dared use them. But where did all the WMD come from, and why the sudden fright now about these stockpiles’ being deployed?”
Hanson further stated, “For much of the Bush administration we heard from the Left the refrain, “Bush lied, thousands died,” as if the president had cooked intelligence reports to conjure up a nonexistent threat from Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMD — stockpiles that Bill Clinton had insisted until his last days in office posed an existential threat to the United States.”
