Donald Trump owes George W. Bush an apology

By Tom Quiner

Donald Trump smears George W. Bush

“He lied. He got us into the war with lies.”

Thus proclaimed Donald Trump in last night’s Republican debate in South Carolina, as he joined with Democrats who claimed that, “Bush lied and people died.”

It’s not true, of course, as this blog has written here and here.

You’ve heard the lie a thousand times from liberals, but you don’t except to hear it from a Republican, who should know better. Then again, we’re talking about Donald Trump who seems quite comfortable saying what ever moves him at the moment, regardless how disconnected from the truth it may be.

Even the New York Times, one of George W. Bush’s staunchest critics, acknowledges that Bush did NOT lie regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In a sprawling 10,000 word, 8-part essay on they subject written in 2014, they pretty much exonerated Mr. Bush of the claims that he lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Excerpts:

“In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Jarrod Lampier was there. The recently retired Army major witnessed the discovery of some 2400 nerve-agent rockets which were unearthed at a former Republican Guard compound:

“Troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. ‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say.’

The Times belatedly reports that …

“Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of ‘wounds that never happened’ from ‘that stuff that didn’t exist.’ The public, he said, was misled for a decade. ‘I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ he said. ‘There were plenty.'”

The Times reported that Wikileaks revelations in 2010 built on the growing realization that Bush was right:

“By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). … Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.”

Any political detractor of Mr. Bush with a smattering of character should step forward and apologize profusely for smearing a good man.

Sadly, they haven’t.

Perhaps they’re too busy covering the New York loudmouth who would benefit from a high dosage injection of character.

Mr. Trump should apologize to Mr. Bush. I suspect, though, that a guy who has never asked God for forgiveness, wouldn’t know how to do it.