Going to War With Lies

Trump’s 2008 Call for Bush’s Impeachment Rings Even Truer for Himself

In a 2008 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Donald Trump expressed surprise that Nancy Pelosi hadn’t acted to impeach George Bush, “which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing.” When asked what he meant, he said, “For the war. He lied. He got us into the war with lies.”

Random Lengths News argued much the same at the time. In fact, we favorably reviewed  The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder in which Vincent Bugliosi argued that Bush should be tried for murder for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, and that impeachment would be “a joke” given the scale of Bush’s alleged crimes.

We’d been calling out Bush’s lies since they began, when Trump still supported the war. So it was nice for him to finally catch up. He got a lot of mileage out of that position — it helped him crush Bush’s brother, Jeb, in the 2016 GOP primary, and it fooled a lot of pundits (and ordinary folks as well) into thinking of him as a “peace candidate.” As an infamous Maureen Dowd column put it: “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.”

Fast forward 10 years and what do we have? Trump still thinks of himself as a peacemaker. He claims he’s stopped eight wars and he’s crowned himself the head of an international “Board of Peace.”

But the eight wars claim is bogus. None were really ended, he wasn’t primarily responsible, and one wasn’t even a war to begin with. He’s actually bombed seven countries in just over a year — a record since World War II.

And the most recent, second bombing of Iran, which could lead to an open-ended war, was justified with lies so careless and slapdash that MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow quickly debunked them all in a matter of minutes, just a few hours after the bombing began, just by quoting Trump’s own top officials, or by making commonsense observations.

“We can basically rule out all of the reasons he has said he’s doing it,” Maddow said. “Is Iran on the precipice of having ballistic missiles that can reach the United States? Absolutely not.” She went on to note that Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “one day Iran might have that kind of capability … just like you or I might one day learn to fly or to time travel.”

Next, she asked, “Is Iran a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment as the president’s diminutive real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, asserted this week?” Again, “No, they are not.” And again it was Marco Rubio who admitted it, just three days earlier at a press conference in St. Kitts and Nevis. He said, “They are not enriching right now.”

Does Iran have “some advanced nuclear program that’s rushing toward a bomb?” Maddow asked. After Trump claimed it had been “totally obliterated” in a previous air strike last June, it’s hard to say, it “might now suddenly be back again,” she noted.

But Trump has also said recently that he just wants the Iranian government to say the words that they are not pursuing a nuclear bomb. Which, Maddow noted, they “actually over and over again keep saying.

“Is it because Donald Trump really feels for the Iranian people?” Maddow asked. After all, he said in his announcement he wants them to rise up and overthrow their despotic government.

But “If you wanted that to happen, you probably could have taken some steps to help that happening,” she noted. And of course, Trump hadn’t. He hadn’t even bothered to build a coalition to push for regime change.

As Maddow scrolled through the list of paper-thin reasons, it was hard not to recall how much more serious, detailed effort the Bush administration had put into backing up and selling its lies.

But Bush’s biggest, most consequential lie was validating Osama bin Laden’s — that he was a warrior, rather than a mass-murdering criminal. And by lying his way into war — first in Afghanistan, then Iraq — without UN approval or a formal declaration of war, he began the process of destroying the post-WWII rules-based order that Trump is now trying to finish.

“The U.N. Charter is not ambiguous. Article 2, Section 4 prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or the political independence of any state,” veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody told Democracy Now! on Feb. 2. There are two exceptions: self-defense or if the Security Council authorizes it. “And so, President Trump has presumptively committed the crime, the international crime, of aggression, as he did in Venezuela and as — and just as Vladimir Putin did in Ukraine,” Brody said. “And at the Nuremberg trials, the supreme international crime was considered to be aggression, crimes against peace.”

The crime of aggression was how WWII started, and the UN was established by the victors in that war to ensure that it never happened again. While there have obviously been violations, they’ve been repeatedly condemned as such. It’s a far different world than existed before — a world that few still living remember. And forgetting how bad that pre-WWII world was is a big factor in how carelessly we seem to be returning to it.

But another big factor was Bush breaking the rules, and setting a precedent for others to follow. Along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he went very far to try to secure UN approval to invade Iraq. They manipulated Colin Powell into a dishonest presentation to the Security Council, hoping his reputation would persuade skeptics. Behind the scenes, they brought incredible pressure on Security Council members to support approving the war. When all that failed, they went to war anyway, falsely claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that imminently threatened America.

The fact that they tried so hard to get UN approval shows that they recognized its value — pragmatically, in the short-term, at least. But the fact that they acted without it anyway showed how little they recognized its true, long-term value in setting a standard for building a better world. Putin followed Bush’s example in invading Ukraine, not even bothering to try to get UN approval. Now Trump is doing the same. And China could soon follow with Taiwan.

More than that, Trump created his “Board of Peace,” stacked with dictators and criminals like himself, with the evolving ambition to challenge, if not replace the UN as a power-broking international body, with himself in charge for as long as he wants to be — the would-be world leader of leaders.

Here at home, Trump is also violating the Constitution, as Brody also noted.

“The framers were very cognizant that executives, that kings start war, and that war is the most consequential decision that a nation can take, and it should not be left to a single person’s judgment,” he said. “The framers had seen the alternative, the royal prerogative of bringing a war, and that was precisely the kind of tyranny they wanted to avoid.”

So what is to be done?

Trump himself has already told us: He should be impeached. “For the war. He lied. He got us into the war with lies.”

Already, the public isn’t buying. Just one in four Americans say they back U.S. strikes on Iran, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. This compares to 91% support for Bush post-9/11, 88% for his handling of the war in March 2002, months into the Afghanistan war, 76% support for invading Iraq one year later, after Bush gave his “final ultimatum” speech.

In short, this isn’t just an illegal war, and an attack against international law. It isn’t just an unconstitutional war, giving more power to an aspiring tyrant. It’s also a deeply unpopular war, at the very beginning, when normally support would be highest.

Maybe, just once, Trump is right: he should be impeached.