“Fair Game”: Fact and Fable about George W. Bush

The political thriller, “Fair Game,” is about to open in movie theaters, and it revives an old question: Did George W. Bush lie about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

Germans will just love a movie premiering this Thursday. Its title is “Fair Game,” and it tells of the struggle an American couple has trying to understand war, where truth is always the first casualty. CIA agent Valerie Plame is portrayed by Naomi Watts and her diplomat husband, Joe Wilson, by Sean Penn. They discover prior to the Iraq War that, despite a rumor spread by British intelligence to the contrary, Saddam Hussein had never attempted to buy 50 tons of weapons-grade uranium in Niger. But nobody in the American government wants to hear that. George W. Bush even repeats the rumor. When the couple goes public with their information, they’re bullied. They suffer both professionally and personally.

The story is well-known, and few people will be surprised when critical reviews of the film mention how repulsive it was that Bush lied so brazenly. When he recently published his memoirs, “Decision Points,” his lies were referred to in many reviews. The word was that the Iraq War began with lies and deceptions, and now Bush was perpetuating those lies in his memoirs. Roger Willemsen, a sort of humanistically educated German version of Michael Moore, said of George Bush that lying had always been his métier, and the Iraq War offered one of the most ruthless examples of that.

How self-evident the conclusion is that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction prior to the Iraq War is also shown by the fact that no attempt was ever made to prove the assertions. But there’s a reason for that: It wouldn’t work. Whoever tries that approach is himself lying.

A person is lying if he knows the truth but says something to the contrary. So did Bush know prior to invading Iraq that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction? There are no indications that he did. He admitted two years ago that his announcement that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was the biggest mistake of his presidency, but he blamed the intelligence services for that. They gave him faulty information. One may believe that or not, but so far no one has refuted it.

Objections to many Bush administration practices are completely valid. Yes, there was an early obsession with Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had installed a working group called the “Office of Special Plans” (OSP) into the Pentagon as early as the beginning of 2002. Its mission was to turn indicators of possible Iraqi weapons of mass destruction into solid evidence of them (Seymour Hersh has reported extensively on this). Newsweek magazine published a cover story entitled “Cheney’s Long Path to War” in November 2003. It described the tricks and maneuvers Cheney used to involve the U.S. in the Iraq War. The CIA was exploited, the State Department under Colin Powell’s leadership was marginalized, and a “parallel government” was established that was the de facto center of power. Bob Woodward’s book, “Plan of Attack,” even refers to a “Gestapo office” within the White House.

On Feb. 5, 2003, Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council and presented putative evidence influenced by the OSP showing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Powell later called the episode “a ‘blot’ on his record.” Neither can George Tenet, former CIA director, be blamed since he, too, was convinced of the validity of the information. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an enthusiastic supporter of the war, told Vanity Fair magazine that the decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war was made solely for “bureaucratic reasons.” It was an excuse upon which all could agree.

Democratic Senator Henry Waxman began an investigation into faulty intelligence used by the Bush administration as justification a year prior to the war. A total of 237 misleading statements were registered on 125 separate occasions. Embellishments, omissions, repressions and exaggerations were the rule rather than the exception. But even all that does not constitute proof that Bush knowingly lied about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and to date no one has been able to establish that as fact.

But why wasn’t Bush more careful? Why did he make claims for which he had no backup? Remember, Bush wasn’t alone. No prominent Western politician publicly disputed Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction prior to the war. There were many skeptics who remained unconvinced (rightly, as it turned out), but no one dared take a public stand to the contrary.

The world was aware that Iraq had built chemical weapons and deployed them against Iran in the 1980s. He also used them against the Shiites and Kurds in his own country. Saddam kept his biological warfare program hidden from U.N. weapons inspectors. It was only discovered in 1995. True, he actually began destroying these stockpiles, but the destruction was not yet complete in 1998 when U.N. inspectors left Iraq. What became of the remainder of those stockpiles remains a mystery to this day.

Did Saddam secretly destroy them? Did the dictator tolerate U.N. sanctions against his country for years for no reason whatsoever? Even U.N. Chief Inspector Hans Blix, a vehement critic of the Bush administration, said on the eve of the Iraq invasion that there were “strong suspicions” that Iraq still possessed about 10,000 liters of anthrax. The fate of “thousands of tons of biochemical weapons” is still unclear, a finding that agrees with information known to many intelligence agencies.

Moreover, U.N. Resolution 1441 placed the burden of proof clearly on Saddam Hussein and not on the United States or the United Nations. He had to prove what had become of the stockpiles of nerve gas and other biochemical weapons that were still in his possession in 1998. He had to prove that all forbidden delivery systems had been destroyed. The 12,000-page report he submitted to the U.N. in December 2002 failed to provide such proof. Critical questions remained unanswered, Blix complained to the Security Council.

In view of the catastrophic course of the Iraq War, one might consider it irrelevant whether Bush lied, but that’s not the point. A politician may make dreadful mistakes and horrible decisions, but to accuse him of lying means to stigmatize him not only for his foolishness, but for evildoing as well.

One good thing to come out of this film “Fair Game” is that the mistaken belief that Bush lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction collides head on with the conspiracy theory that his government was somehow behind the 9/11 attacks. How could the same crowd be so cunning as to choreograph history’s greatest terrorist attack with its 3,000-plus victims, and yet be so stupid as to neglect to hide a couple of barrels of biological weapons in Iraq that they could later conveniently discover?

Truth really is the first victim of war, but after the war it often becomes paradox: All Cretans are liars, says the Epimenides Paradox.