Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new book brings the question of who lied about Iraq to the front pages once again. Those on the left have claimed for years that the Bush administration lied about the threat from Iraq in the lead up to the war – often defining “lying” as omitting information that did not support the decision to invade from the case they made to the American people.   If those on the left describe emphasizing the threat posed by Iraq before the war as a lie, then what do they call their current depiction of the situation in Iraq, as well as their characterization of how the war began?

One of the most constant criticisms of the Bush administration regarding the war in Iraq has been that President Bush “lied us into war.”  When asked for the specific “lie” the answer is usually that Bush oversold the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States.  The “lie” is said to be that Bush and his administration emphasized only evidence that supported the decision to invade.

But those on the left have consistently ignored or downplayed the seriousness of the threat most intelligence told us Iraq posed before the war.  Even worse, they are now ignoring the progress, and in many cases downright successes, being seen in Iraq since the “surge.”

A lot of attention is being given to the new book by McClellan who calls the decision to invade Iraq a "serious strategic blunder."  The book was touted by many this week as proof that “Bush lied” about Iraq, but in an interview on the Today show Thursday he said something else.

.“I trusted the president's foreign policy team and I believed the president when he talked about the grave and gathering danger from Iraq…I believe he believed it was a grave danger, too.” McClellan believes Bush “convinced himself of that,” but there were some very real reasons to believe it – reasons that convinced not only Bush that Saddam posed a serious danger, but also many Democrats, including even John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

When those on the left continue to claim there was no reason to go into Iraq and that the entire war was based on “Bush’s lies” they are lying to the American public. 

In just one recent example, Mark Eichenlaub (writing at National Review in March) noted newly released information from the Iraqi Perspectives Project (including 600,000 Iraqi documents) showing “that Saddam Hussein’s regime funded, trained, and assisted terrorist groups (including al-Qaeda proxies), and sometimes actually ordered them to attack American citizens, American interests, and American allies” and “was simultaneously using its intelligence and security apparatus to plot and conduct terror attacks of its own.”

Steve Schippert described the cherry-picking done by those in the American media who, instead of reporting the extent to which Saddam was involved in terrorist activity, chose to dismiss the relevance of the project’s findings by summarizing “a 94 page report down to a single, unrepresentative phrase.”

Eichenlaub wrote, “Because of Saddam’s removal, which came at considerable cost in American blood and gold, a ‘formal instrument’ of state terrorism is no longer secretly plotting to kill Americans. The American public deserves to know what a threat was removed for that price.”

Most have probably never seen or heard the actual content of the Iraqi Perspective Project report and this is only one example of information discovered since the invasion of Iraq that reinforces the belief by so many at the time that Saddam’s Iraq posed a real threat to American citizens.

It is important, especially this year when Americans are electing a new President, to look at all the information available in the months prior to the Iraq invasion, rather than looking only to the media’s often inaccurate Cliff’s Notes version.  Continued...