Who Chose the War, Mr. President?

It's hard to say what was the biggest whopper that President Bush told yesterday about Iraq in his press conference. He lied about Al Qaeda, he lied about Iran, he lied about the benchmarks. But let's start with the first lie. President Bush claimed that it was Saddam Hussein and not the Bush Administration that chose war in 2003:

Bush: And now I'll be glad to answer a few questions, starting with Ms. Thomas.

Q Mr. President, you started this war, a war of your choosing, and you can end it alone, today, at this point - bring in peacekeepers, U.N. peacekeepers. Two million Iraqis have fled their country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don't you understand, you brought the al Qaeda into Iraq.

THE PRESIDENT: Actually, I was hoping to solve the Iraqi issue diplomatically. That's why I went to the United Nations and worked with the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. That was the message, the clear message to Saddam Hussein. He chose the course.

Q Didn't we go into Iraq --

THE PRESIDENT: It was his decision to make.

Predictably, there was no followup by the other journalists. The fact is that when President Bush chose war, Iraq was cooperating with UN weapons inspectors, whose reports indicated that Iraq was in compliance with UN resolutions.

As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted in a release on June 8,

At the Republican candidates' debate on June 5, White House contender Mitt Romney remarkably claimed that weapons inspectors were barred from entering Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. But Romney's error was little noted by the mainstream media... [Romney] explained: "If you're saying let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in."

Romney's suggestion that weapons inspectors were not permitted into Iraq before the war started is, of course, incorrect. Weapons inspectors from UNMOVIC (the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) returned to Iraq on November 18, 2002. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors spent months in Iraq, issuing reports on Iraqi compliance that were a crucial part of the debate over whether to invade Iraq

This is a big deal, right? Not according to the mainstream media...

Romney's false statement, though, was barely mentioned in the press. During a post-debate discussion on CNN (6/5/07), Democratic strategist Paul Begala called it a "huge mistake.... like saying the Mexicans bombed Pearl Harbor." But Begala's co-panelists, Republican strategist Mike Murphy and conservative pundit Amy Holmes, challenged Begala's facts. The bizarre discussion closed with host Anderson Cooper saying, "We're not going to get this resolved tonight."

Beyond Begala's CNN comments, media have shown little interest in correcting Romney's error. As Media Matters noted (6/6/07), the Washington Post had a "Gaffe of the Night" feature, but that honor went to candidate Mike Huckabee for getting Ronald Reagan's birthday wrong. The New York Times' Paul Krugman (6/8/07) cited the Washington Post's ignoring Romney's clear lack of understanding of the events that led us into the Iraq War in favor of the birthday goof as evidence that "the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven't changed a bit."

Why wouldn't the press pay attention to this? FAIR has a theory:

But if the press were to admit that rewriting of recent history was cause for alarm, they might have to acknowledge that George W. Bush has done the same thing. On July 14, 2003, Bush declared of Saddam Hussein, "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." The comment received little media attention, with the Washington Post (7/15/03) saying only that his assertion "appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring." If the current occupant of the White House is given such a pass, perhaps it's no surprise that the same treatment is given to Republican candidates looking to succeed him.

OK, let's put the FAIR theory to the test. Watch the press today and tomorrow and see if any mainstream news outlet examines the President's claim that it was Saddam Hussein, and not George W. Bush, who chose war in 2003.

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