Many liberals seem to have decided that Bush lied. This belief has consumed them with a rage approaching the right wing's self-destructive hysteria over Bill Clinton's liberty with the truth.
Supposedly Bush claimed in the State of the Union address that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger (often confused with Nigeria), and therefore the American people, afraid of nukes in Saddam Hussein's hands, were duped into war. This accusation, if true, would be incredibly damning.
To play up the accusation, the Democratic Party continuously ran a television advertisement over the summer. This ad uses a Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am style that asserts Bush said \Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,"" and that this fact has been ""proven to be false."" Then the ad exhorts us to ""demand the truth."" Indeed. Well, let us search for the truth.
Yes, there was a document that claimed Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Yes, undoubtedly the document is a forgery and the Bush administration knew this before the State of the Union address. However, this is not the intelligence referred to in the president's speech.
Take a look at the full quote, which the Democratic National Committee kindly shortened to save reading time: ""The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."" The source of this claim is the British intelligence agency, not the forged document. Numerous British officials have publicly defended their intelligence on this matter and to this day defend the veracity of the claim. Also, their intelligence refers to Africa in general, not just Niger. Bush's statement is correct.
Admittedly, this statement was based on evidence that is not very strong, namely a foreign government's report that had not been independently verified by our government. The British intelligence agency has yet to release their sources, so it is impossible for us to judge whether they are accurate-though we generally trust the intelligence findings of our ally Great Britain. This statement was not repeated later at the very important presentation to the United Nations given by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
We cannot yet know whether the British report was true, but it was absolutely true that as Bush said, the British government believes Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Africa. The accusation that Bush lied will still be wrong even if at a later date the intelligence is shown to be mistaken.
There is a huge difference between lies and relying on evidence that turns out to be wrong. In order to show that Bush lied, it is necessary to show that he knew what he was saying was false before the speech and included it in order to deceive the country. The claim he made, and apparently believed, was true. The British government did claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa.
Furthermore, the accusation that this statement was decisive in leading this country to war is nothing more than historical revisionism. This one claim had very little impact on the debate at the time, and was barely mentioned in most coverage of the presidential address. The CBS News real-time assessment of the viewers for the State of the Union address, conducted by Knowledge Networks, found ""the statement about uranium affected none of the three political groups, either favorably or unfavorable.""
The real debate was about chemical and biological weapons and focused, not on whether Saddam Hussein had them, but how we should deal with them. Al Gore, Clinton, the United Nations, Germany, France and Russia all believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but were unsure as to how dangerous or immediate their threat. Nuclear weapons were only rarely discussed and added little to the momentum that led to war. To pretend this statement was vital for the administrations cassus belli is extremely misleading.
The controversy surrounding these 16 words in the State of the Union address deserves to be remembered as nothing more than overheated summer rhetoric. As the Swedish former executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997, Rolf Ekeus said, ""Detractors of Bush and Blair have tried to make political capital of the presumed discrepancy between the top-level assurances about Iraq's possession of chemical weapons [and other WMD] and the inability of invading forces to find such stocks. The criticism is a distortion and trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security.""
