Laura Bush Lies on W's Deliberations on Iraq

We are presented with bizarre and unpleasantly public evidence that Laura Bush is a liar.

Mrs. Bush, during her speech at the Republican National Convention last night, described long, agonized deliberations by W. on whether or not to go to war in Iraq. She describes him, walking the White House lawn, deliberating the attack.

W. may have been doing some agonizing thinking on that lawn, but it wasn't about whether or not to attack Iraq.
Laura Bush's account stands in sharp contrast to every other insider account of Bush's decision to attack Iraq -- for example, Bob Woodward, Richard Clarke, -- in which Bush exhibited aggressive relish to get the goods on Iraq and invade immediately. Bob Woodward's accounts ("Bush's War", "") have Bush drawing up war plans as soon as he entered the White House, a year before 9/11. Richard Clarke famously describes how, in the hours after the 9/11 attacks, Bush insisted Clarke turn his sights on Iraq, and find a connection. And, the very famously public battles of Colin Powell to take the Administration's case for war to the UN before a US attack revealed W was not pining long hours over whether or not to send troops in, but was in full blush ready to go mode.

Mrs. Bush, in describing her husband as deliberating and agonizing over whether or not to attack Iraq, has given the only existing evidence that W. had any hesitation whatsoever in doing so. Nobody else describes W raising questions -- to himself, or to others -- about the quality of our intelligence, the trustworthiness of its conclusions, the proportionate risks to the lives and sacrifices of the 120,000 soldiers he would send. He was all to ready to do it.