Rice to return to Stanford to spin history

She's coming ba-ack. Condoleezza Rice is returning to Stanford after Janurary 20, 2009. That's not good news. She's a war criminal and should be in prison, serving time for her part in the Bush conspiracy for perpetrating war and the deaths of over one million Iraqi civilians. But somehow, she'll get another chance at Stanford to rewrite history.

Get this from the Nukes and Spooks team over at McClatchy:

The Bush administration will soon be history, but that hasn't stopped its senior members from trying to rewrite history for the next couple of months ... and no doubt, long after.

We were watching a video of CSPAN's interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when we had to suddenly stop and hit the rewind button. Rice said this, and we quote:

When I go to Europe, I no longer see any difference in the view that a stable and secure Iraq is in everybody’s interest, and that an Iraq that is democratic and in which Saddam Hussein, that brutal monster that caused three wars in the region, including dragging us in twice, that used – who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, that an Iraq that is democratic and friendly to the West is better for the Middle East. I don’t see much disagreement about that.

Dragging us in twice?

Pause. Think about that.

I mean, everyone--or most everyone--agrees that former President George H.W. Bush had to respond after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and threatened to go further south, into the Saudi oil fields. That's once. I suppose it's possible that by "twice," Rice was referring to U.S. involvement in the Iran-Iraq war, when the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers to protect them from threats to shipping, and got involved in various other ways (including by suppling intel to our-then friend Saddam Hussein to help him fight Iran).

But it seems more likely that Rice was arguing that Saddam "dragged us in" to the Iraq War. That's not our memory here at Nukes and Spooks. In fact, the record is now clear (as we reported at the time) that President George W. Bush had decided to go to war against Iraq in early 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction or significant, operational ties to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. The Bush administration dismissed Saddam's accounting of his WMD, ignored offers of mediation, and used bogus and false intelligence to make the case for war. It didn't let the U.N. Security Council or opposition from Europeans get in the way. All that makes for an odd definition of "dragging us in." Read more >>