Josh Marshall boils down the multitudinous lies of George Bush concerning the invasion of Iraq rather nicely here.

1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans’ horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn to protect.

2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches despite the fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried to prevent the president from doing so. What’s the explanation for that? At best a reckless disregard for the truth in making the case war to the American public.

3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there was a strong consensus within the foreign policy establishmnet that Iraq continued to stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since Saddam had stockpiled and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had been free of on-site weapons inspections for almost four years. But what most observers meant by this was chemical and possibly biological weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference! The White House knew that this wasn’t enough to get the country into war, so they pushed the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much less evidence.

4. The fact that the administration’s push for war wasn’t even about WMD in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don’t get an email from a reader who writes, “I always knew that Saddam didn’t have WMDs. How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn’t know that too?” Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush’s very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn’t bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway — the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn’t about WMD.

Now I’m one of those who always thought Josh was wrong about WMDs, as wrong as Bush was and is. The Christian Science Monitor, in the pre-invasion days, had a multi-part article (to which, sadly, I have no link and which is buried in their pay archive by now) illustrating that in fact, in the period between 1998 and 2002, Saddam had been pretty actively dismantling his WMD program for chem/bio weapons, likely as a response to the pressure Clinton and others were putting on him through the bombing campaign and other international pressure. So I will always find it bizarre when even Democrats and liberals (not synonyms) claim they thought he had WMD. The amount of gullibility required to come to that conclusion even in 2002-2003 given the amount of publicly available information to the contrary, is too much for me to accept among otherwise intelligent people.

But Josh really hits on a good point here, one I’ve made in talking with people over the last 3 years. It really mattered very little if Saddam did indeed have some level of chem/bio weapon capability because it by itself does not rise to the level of justifying an invasion. Even an active chem/bio war program was no threat to the US in any way, especially since it was very well-known that Saddam and fundamentalists terrorists were like oil and water, they hated each other and he was hardly about to help them out in any way. About the most he could do was up his profile a bit with other Arabs by paying pocket change to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, which not only hardly makes him unique in the region it makes him a pretty poor tipper compared to the Saudis, who regularly hold telethons to raise money for Palestinian causes.

So the case here isn’t, and never has been, whether there were any weapons in Iraq but whether Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US. It never did and had no possibility of doing so in our lifetimes. That’s what makes Bush’s actions an international war crime, in my opinion, that’s what makes it eminently an impeachable offense (though I oppose impeachment because it does nothing to rid us of the underlying problems) and that’s what the media needs to focus on.

Bush’s lies the other day, on top of all the lies of his presidency, are an insult to every American with a brain.