So here we have Britain's 2.6-million word Chilcot report, boiled down to a few hundred words from the New York Times, then buried beneath 900 words of misdirection from Eli Lake, one of the most notorious reporters in the run-up to the Iraq war ("Blair didn't lie his way into Iraq. Neither did Bush," July 8).
What could possibly go wrong?
First, let's not bury the lead. The Iraq invasion and subsequent turmoil caused an estimated "461,000 excess deaths from 2003 to 2011" (Chilcot, section 17, citing a University of Washington survey in PLOS Medicine, 2013). Given this background, Lake's piece is vandalism in a graveyard.
Second, after all of the false alarms over Nigerian yellowcake, drones, mobile germ labs, aluminum tubes, underground weapons laboratories, false links to 9/11, false links to Al-Qaida, false links to Amerithrax, false comparisons to the Cuban missile crisis, and after the hounding and character assassination of critics, after the congressional arm-twisting, after the U.N. spying — after all that, Lake attempts to take a damning report on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and somehow turn it into an exoneration of President George W. Bush.
Sorry, but no.
A 2008 study from two nonprofit journalism groups found that Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following 9/11, with Bush responsible for 260.
Maybe Lake is being legalistic here, splitting semantic hairs between "lies" vs. "deceptive and knowingly misleading."
Perhaps he is simply trying to temper the ongoing demonization of Bush, a motive for which I have some sympathy (since the war took root during the administration of Bill Clinton, with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's "sanctions will continue" Georgetown speech in 1997 and the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998).
