Washington, March 07: Former top advisor to US President George W. Bush claims his ex-boss did not deceive the American public into invading Iraq seven years ago.
“Did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not,” Karl Rove wrote in his new book, CNN reported on Saturday.
In his book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” Rove has tried to defend the eight-year administration of Bush.
In 2003, the US attacked Iraq under the pretext that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, but an official CIA report in 2005 confirmed that there were no such weapons in the country.
Rove also made the extraordinary claim that Washington would ‘not’ have gone to war with Iraq if the administration knew that weapons of mass destruction would not be found.
“Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it,” he wrote.
“Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the threat of WMD. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq’s horrendous human rights violations.”
Former deputy chief of staff also defended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), including waterboarding that Democrats and others have described as torture.
“When these techniques were first authorized, Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use,” he wrote.
“Nonetheless, when political winds shifted and memories of 9/11 faded, some Democratic leaders claimed that they had never been told about the techniques and that the Bush administration used EITs only in secret.”
Rove also says Bush “never authorized torture,” but rather “did just the opposite” by making sure the techniques “did not cross the legal line into torture.”
George W. Bush has been turned into one of the most unpopular presidents in the United States during his two terms in office. Two costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the economic recession were among the main reasons that put Bush at the bottom of the list.
More than one million Iraqis have died following the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003, according to 2007 estimates published by the independent London-based polling agency, Opinion Research Business.
——-Agencies