Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, marked the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with a full-bore effort on Twitter to exonerate his former boss of the charge that his administration invented the rationale for a war that has cost up to a million lives.
“The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow,” wrote Fleischer. “There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] were found, the left claimed ‘Bush lied. People died.’ This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest.”
Journalist David Corn, who wrote a book on the invasion along with Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff, immediately disputed Fleischer’s claims by pointing out lies in the run-up to the war from Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Vox’s Dylan Matthews collected more of Corn’s findings in a July 2016 story entitled “No, really, George W. Bush lied about WMDs.” Among them was Bush’s statement in October 2002 that Hussein had a"massive stockpile" of biological weapons, despite the CIA’s admission that"it had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal.
“It was a shock,” said Zinn in a 2013 documentary based on Corn and Isikoff’s book. “It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program. And that’s when I began to believe they’re getting serious about this. They wanna go into Iraq.
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