Jay Rockefeller's Web of Lies About Iraq

Chris Wallace's interview of Sen. Jay Rockefeller on "Fox News Sunday" provides a good illustration of how the critics' slanders are tethered to their substantive cluelessness on Iraq.

Wallace, admirably attempting to corner the slippery senator, played him a pre-war clip of his own self-damning assertion. "I do believe," said Rockefeller in a speech in October 2002, in which he authorized the use of force in Iraq, "that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11 that question is increasingly outdated."

As Wallace pointed out, Rockefeller "went further than the president ever did," in actually assessing Iraq as an "imminent threat."

Rockefeller sidestepped the question and, unwittingly, made another confession. Rockefeller said, "I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq, that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11."

Can someone please provide an explanation, or any theory no matter how implausible, to justify such recklessly disloyal statements by a leading member of the Senate Intelligence Committee to foreign leaders? Why did this man undermine our president on foreign soil under color of government authority?

Wallace played an equally damning clip of Rockefeller asserting, "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years, and he could have it earlier."

Wallace noted that before making that statement and voting to authorize force in Iraq, Rockefeller had seen the national intelligence estimate, which "indicated there was a disagreement among analysts about [Saddam's] nuclear program." Rockefeller's primary non-answer to the undeniable point that he knew of this disagreement before voting was "You know, it was not the Congress that sent 135,000 or 150,000 troops to Iraq."

Here the Rockefeller/Democrat foreign policy incoherence is exposed for all to see. They admittedly regarded Saddam's threat to be imminent, yet were unwilling to take pre-emptive action against Iraq (all the while being on record as having explicitly authorized it), preferring instead to place our very national security in the hands of other corrupt nations and the America-unfriendly United Nations.

They say President Bush is the liar, when they are the ones who voted unconditionally to authorize pre-emptive action against Iraq and now deny they did, demanding we believe their revisionism instead of our eyes.