Rove Protects the Rear

In a new book, the ex-Bush aide contends W. didn't knowingly mislead the nation into the Iraq war. Here's the history he leaves out.

By David Corn
MotherJones
Thu Mar. 4, 2010

With his soon-to-be-released book, Karl Rove is trying to mount something of a rear-guard action in the war over George W. Bush's legacy. According to the AP [1], which has obtained a copy of the book, Rove blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of [weapons of mass destruction].

And The New York Times reports [2] that in the book, which will hit stores on Tuesday, Rove writes that his failure to counter the narrative that "Bush lied" was "one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years." Rove adds, "did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not."

Here we go again: Did Bush grease the way to war with lies? Having written two books on the subject—The Lies of George W. Bush [3] and (with Michael Isikoff) Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War [4]—I have some skin in this game.

Let's cut to the bottom line: prior to the Iraq war, US intelligence generally produced faulty information overstating Saddam Hussein's WMD capabilities, which were actually nonexistent. But Bush and his crew purposefully and callously overstated these overstatements—and made dramatic and untrue assertions unconnected to the flawed intelligence—in order to whip up popular support for the invasion of Iraq. Mother Jones has produced a timeline [5] that lists the false Bush administration assertions. And to remind Rove—and book reviewers—here's a limited sampling of notable whoppers, reported in my books and elsewhere.

(More here.)