RECOVERED HISTORY: THE REVISION THING

Sam Smith

To refresh memories of the glorious early days of the Iraq war, your editor went back to a piece he wrote for Harpers five years ago: a history of the Iraq invasion told entirely in official lies. Everything in the article, save a few tenses, were just as we were told by the Bush administration and their major advisers. These days, for example, we have reduced the lie about WMDs to an abbreviation but it was far more colorful that that. Here are some excerpts from the 2003 article, The Revision Thing, along with a few items that didn't make the final edit but are too good to forget:

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. . . It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil. . .

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. . . And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. . .

It was a different kind of war because we were fighting people who sent youngsters to suicidal deaths and they tried to find a dark cave. They were lurching around in the dark corners of some cities around the world, ooching around the dark corners of the world and looking out, peeping out around the corner. . .

It was also a war where the enemy didn't show up with airplanes that they own, or tanks or ships. These were suiciders. [One] day we hauled a guy in named al Nashiri. That's not a household name here in America. [You] could understand why some went blank when they heard his name - yeah, those foreign names sure shut us down. . .

In the old days you could count tanks and figure out how strong the enemy was. This was an enemy that hid in caves. They tried to find the darkest cave, the deepest cave. It was a different kind of hater than we were used to. The old haters used tanks.. . .

Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States. . .

The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. . .

It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere. . .

The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.

The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments. We don't take our force and go around the world and try to take other people's real estate or other people's resources, their oil. We never have and we never will.

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were. . .

We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn't want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We've tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush. . .