The post-war debate about the pre-war rhetoric — part II

Jonathan Schwarz’s opening statement on the question:

Jonathan will be arguing in the negative: I concede that no Bush administration official ever said — as far as I’m aware — the precise words “Iraq is an imminent threat.” However, the evidence clearly shows that the idea that the Bush administration argued there was an imminent threat from Iraq is not completely fabricated. (Indeed, I believe any fair reading of Bush administration statements shows that indeed they did clearly claim Iraq was an imminent threat. However, for the purposes of this bet, I need merely show that the idea that they argued Iraq was an imminent threat is not made up out of whole cloth.) For easy reference, I’ve numbered the parts of my argument below. 1. First I’d like to address the most frequently-cited evidence that the statement at issue is true. That is this section from the most recent State of the Union address:

“Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.”

Some, such as Charles Krauthammer, claim this means that “in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush plainly denied that the threat was imminent”. This is incorrect. Bush here did not deny that Iraq was an imminent threat. Rather, he was making the argument that we could not know whether or not Iraq was an imminent threat. In other words, the implication of what Bush was saying was that indeed Iraq might be an imminent threat. (While this is somewhat off-topic, my speculation is that Bush’s speechwriters wrote this section of the State of the Union as they did because they were in a difficult position. They knew people were claiming that we should only attack if Iraq were an imminent threat to the US, and that that idea had a great appeal to many people. And they knew that the idea that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US might appear far-fetched. But at the same time, it wasn’t politically feasible to say explicitly that Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat. So they finessed it, while elsewhere trying to make the threat sound as alarming as possible.) 2. Next, let’s turn to Bush administration claims on other occasions before the war — claims that clearly show that the idea that they argued Iraq was an imminent threat are not completely fabricated. On June 6, 2002, Dick Cheney referred in a speech to the “gathering danger” of Iraq. At the United Nations last year on September 12, Bush himself stated that “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger”. According to Roget’s Interactive Thesaurus, “gathering” is a synonym of “imminent.” 3. In testimony before Congress on September 18 last year, Donald Rumsfeld stated that:

“Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam Hussein is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain… We do know that he has been actively and persistently pursuing nuclear weapons for more than 20 years. But we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons. They’re simpler to deliver and even more readily transferred to terrorist networks, who could allow Iraq to deliver them without Iraq’s fingerprints.”

Here Rumsfeld says that he cannot rule out the possibility that Iraq may be an imminent nuclear threat. More significantly for our purposes, he states that Iraq has biological weapons and that they are an “immediate threat.” According to Roget’s Interactive Thesaurus, “immediate” is also a synonym of “imminent.” 4. On October 16 last year, the following exchange with Ari Fleischer took place at a White House press briefing:

Q Ari, the President has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth. “MR. FLEISCHER: Yes.”

I believe this speaks for itself. 5. During an October 7 speech last year in Cincinnati, Bush stated that:

“Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.” Iraq, he said, was “a threat whose outlines are far more clearly defined [than Al-Qaida], and whose consequences could be far more deadly.”

Later, in the State of the Union, Bush said that terrorists armed by Iraq could “bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” In other words, Bush was arguing that Iraq could on any given day help terrorists bring the U.S. a day of horror like none we have ever known — and that Iraq was a danger comparable or greater than Al-Qaida, which everyone would agree is an imminent threat to America. 6. Next let’s examine three significant interpretations of the Bush administration’s Iraq claims. Radio Free Europe’s headline after Bush’s speech was “Iraq: Bush Tells Americans Saddam Is An Imminent Threat“. Many other news outlets made such claims, but Radio Free Europe’s is particularly noteworthy because it is funded by the U.S. government itself. After the war on this past June 8th, William Kristol — obviously one of the prime journalistic supporters of the war — stated on Fox News Sunday that “Bush and Blair certainly articulated” “the case for urgency”. Also after the war, Ari Fleischer was again asked whether the United States claimed Iraq was an imminent threat. Again he agreed:

“Q Well, we went to war, didn’t we, to find these — because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn’t that true? “MR. FLEISCHER: Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction. And nothing has changed on that front at all. We said what we said because we meant it.”

7. Finally, the blog on the official Bush/Cheney reelection campaign website approvingly cites columnist Kathleen Parker’s “judgment that Kay’s report does indeed prove that conditions in Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world.” It’s worth examining the implications of this closely. George Bush’s official website is promoting the idea that David Kay’s findings prove that Iraq was an imminent threat. Yet what Kay found was far, far less than the unequivocal claims by the Bush administration before the war — that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons and was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. Therefore, by the Bush campaign’s own standards of what constitutes an imminent threat, it logically follows that the Bush administration was arguing that Iraq posed an imminent threat. After all, Iraq could hardly have been more of a threat with what Kay has discovered than it would have been with what the Bush administration said they definitely had. *** In conclusion, let me summarize what Sebastian must argue: Yes, Bush and Cheney did state that Iraq posed a “gathering danger,” which is a synonym for “imminent threat.” Yes, Rumsfeld did state that Iraq’s biological weapons were an “immediate threat,” which is a synonym for “imminent threat.” Yes, the President’s press secretary agreed when asked, both before and after the war, that the Bush administration claimed Iraq was an imminent threat. Yes, Bush said Iraq was as much of a threat as Al-Qaida and could on any given day give terrorists the means to bring us a day of horror like none we’ve ever known. Yes, a news organization funded by the U.S. government believed Bush was saying Iraq was an imminent threat, and William Kristol understood Bush to mean that the case for war was urgent. Yes, according to the standards of Bush’s own official website, the Bush administration argued that Iraq was an imminent threat. Nevertheless, it is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq. I believe this cannot be judged to be a tenable argument — and that therefore I have won this bet. UPDATE: Holsclaw responds.