The Truth-Challenged President Strikes Again

President Bush could greatly help his credibility if he would just tell the truth and admit that he made a terrible mistake in attacking Iraq. Instead, Bush keeps re-re-re-re justifying his invasion of Iraq with the same old pack of misrepresentations.
Bush keeps claiming that he had to invade Iraq to deny the terrorists safe haven. The truth is that there were no al-Qaeda camps or any terrorist camps in Iraq before Bush invaded (except for one terrorist camp in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq out of the reach of Saddam). It was well known before Bush invaded that the religious fundamentalist terrorists hated the atheist and socialist Saddam. Saddam was not about to share power with terrorists who hated him about as much as they hate us.
Bush is still claiming that he had to invade Iraq to get rid of WMD. We already know that the Bush administration cherry picked intelligence to exaggerate the presence of WMD in Iraq. They only picked those bits of intelligence that reinforced their preconceived ideas and ignored the over whelming preponderance of the intelligence that threw doubt on their conclusions.  By continuing to make this claim in the face of so much contrary evidence, only shows how much trouble Bush has dealing with truth and reality.
Bush keeps claiming that he had to invade Iraq to keep Saddam from giving WMD to the terrorists. The truth is that Osama bin Laden had declared Saddam an infidel and an enemy of Muslims. Even if Saddam had had WMD (possibly a few old barrels of poison may have been flown to Syria before the invasion), he would never have given them to terrorists since they would have been just as likely to use the weapons on him.
Bush would be well served to just come clean and tell the truth of why he invaded Iraq instead of continuing to repeat the same old lies and half-truths that got us into this mess. The truth is that the neocons led by Dick Cheney had been clamoring for the invasion of Iraq since the mid-nineties in order to set up permanent bases from which they (mistakenly) thought the U.S. could control the whole oil producing region. The attacks on 9/11 served as a convenient excuse to try to implicate Iraq. The Bush administration set about that task by using the fear and anger over 9/11 along with cherry-picked intelligence and carefully worded accusations (such as “proof could come in the form of a mushroom cloud”) to manipulate Americans into believing Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and presented a “gathering menace”. All the while they knew Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, they chose to use that horrible event for their own purposes. I am all for defending the United States against real threats and enemies such as we confronted in Afghanistan. But to cynically use the horror of 9/11 to manipulate this country into an unnecessary war in Iraq for their own ulterior motives is nothing short of criminal.