If you tell a lie long enough it becomes reality to many.  That is what is happening every day in the leftist media.  The lie is that President Bush lied about the reason for going to war in Iraq.  The fact that this statement is a lie does not deter those asserting it.  And it does not deter those who are already on the left or who don’t pay much attention from believing it.

Here is the truth.  President Bush gave many reasons for going to war in Iraq.  The belief that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was but one of them.  In the face of the continuing onslaught of lies, I want to remind the thoughtful of the truth. Therefore, I am going to repeat a commentary that I wrote on this blog on March 30 of this year.

A few months ago I listed several reasons that were given by the Bush Administration for entering the war with Iraq.  No matter how many times these reasons are listed by writer after writer, the un-loyal opposition continues to assert the fact that the only reason given by the Bush Administration for entering the war was the “lie” that Iraq housed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Once again, the truth must be told.  Clifford D. May of the Scripps Howard news Service (Minneapolis StarTribune, March 27, 2005) has provided a short list of reasons given by President Bush and others in his administration for the need to remove Saddam Hussein. 

President Bush, October 7, 2002:  Saddam Hussein “has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States.”  He added “Some Al-Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq.  These include one very senior Al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad….” (That was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who still beheads people in Iraq.)

President Bush, September 12, 2002 (in a speech before the U.N. General Assembly):  If we meet our responsibilities the people of Iraq can shake off their captivity.  They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world.  These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond.

Paul Wolfowitz, October 16, 2002:  “Iraq is part of the global war on terrorism because Iraq represents one of the first and best opportunities to begin building what President Bush has referred to as a better world beyond the war on terrorism.”

As noted by Clifford D. May, it is “odd that such clear and compelling justifications for the war have been largely forgotten in what passes for debate these days.”

Who actually is the "liar" ?

It is incumbent on us as Americans to remind those who lie about the reasons for entering this war that they are lying, that we know they are lying, and that they can tell the lie as often as they want and we won’t believe it.