Nothing But Words

On numerous occasions, and even now on the campaign trail, Bush and Cheney have turned to one of their favorite – and seemingly compelling – talking points: how our pre-emptive action in Iraq convinced Libya to give up its WMD efforts and renounce terrorism. The only trouble, of course, is it’s a load of rubbish. This is actually old news, as the truth came out months ago, but the story never got a lot of coverage. Qaddafi’s change of heart was brought about by a series of negotiations, begun by the Clinton administration in 1999 (and – in a rare instance of not dismissing all things Clintonian – continued by the Bush administration). The whole story can be found in a pair of New York Times editorials, one by North Africa analyst Geoff Porter and another by the former director for Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council, Flynt Leverett (these links go to reprints of those articles, as they’re not freely accesible on the New York Times site).

The reason I bring this up now is to point you to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post: A Gaddafi Cover-Up. It seems the Bush administration feels so strongly about maintaining the effectiveness of their talking point that they’re willing to overlook a November 2003 assassination attempt of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, instigated by none other than Qaddafi himself. I know it sounds like one of those things that’s too bizarre to be true, but read the article and judge for yourself. The Bush administration has tied itself into incredible knots trying to put a good face on the Iraq debacle. It’s reached the point where an otherwise inexplicable foreign policy decision – giving Qaddafi a free pass after he tried to have one of our allies killed – starts making sense in the strange, reversed world of the administration’s spin.