“Pelosi’s reasoning doesn’t make sense—starting a war based on a coordinated public lie is illegal, and therefore more than enough grounds for impeachment.”

In a CNN Town Hall last Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the striking claim that despite knowing that the Bush Administration had lied to the public about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, she did not view the former president’s deception as worthy of impeachment. Critics condemned Pelosi’s remark as a reflection of a warped sense of priorities, in which Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate a political rival is more serious than misleading the public into an illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

“Speaker Pelosi, you resisted calls for the impeachment of President Bush in 2006, and President Trump following the Mueller report earlier this year,” student Dean Chien asked Pelosi at the town hall. “This time is different. Why did you oppose impeachment in the past, and what is your obligation to protect our democracy from the actions of our president now?”

“When I became speaker the first time there was overwhelming call for me to impeach President Bush on the strength of the war in Iraq which I vehemently opposed,” Pelosi answered. “That was my wheel house, I was in intelligence, I was a ranking member in the intelligence committee… so I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq, it just wasn’t there… the intelligence did not show that was the case.

“So I knew it was a misrepresentation to the public,” Pelosi continued. “But having said that, in my view, it was not grounds for impeachment.”

The Bush Administration’s Lies

Bush administration officials continue to characterize their false claims about WMDs that led to the invasion of Iraq as an honest mistake, but there are numerous instances of the administration exaggerating or blatantly fabricating about their knowledge of Iraq’s weapons, and an enormous amount of evidence that they knew what they were doing.

In August 2002, Dick Cheney declared, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had access to the same intelligence, later described his dismay at Cheney’s statement: “It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”

“John McLaughlin, the CIA’s deputy director, shortly afterward told Congress that the likelihood of Iraq initiating a WMD attack ‘would be low,'” wrote the Intercept’s Jon Schwarz. “Another CIA official later recalled that the agency’s reaction to Cheney’s speech was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?'”

Schwarz emphasizes the case of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who was a powerful figure in the Hussein regime in charge of Iraq’s real WMD-program in the 1980s. Kamel later split from the regime and defected to Jordan in 1995, where he told the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and British intelligence that Iraq had disarmed of any form of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Kamel was assassinated in 1996 upon return to Iraq.

Despite Kamel’s statement to intelligence agencies and a 1995 CNN interview where he says “Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction,” Bush administration officials used him as justification for the war. In Cheney’s August 2002 speech, he referred to Kamel as his source:

“We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors — including Saddam’s own son-in-law [Hussein Kamel].”

Donald Rumsfeld told Congress weeks later of the importance of informants like Kamel, without mentioning that Kamel said that Iraq had no weapons:

“Unless we have people inside the Iraqi program who are willing to tell us what they have and where they have it — as we did in 1995 with the defection of Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel — it is easy for the Iraqi regime to hide its capabilities from us.”

Bush and Colin Powell, who doctored Iraqi communications in his U.N presentation making the case for war, also invoked Kamel in their reasoning.

The number of exaggerations and lies is too long to list, but another notable misrepresentation regarded the relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. “On September 18, 2001, Rice received a memo summarizing intelligence on the relationship, which concluded there was little evidence of links,” wrote Vox’s Dylan Matthews. “Nonetheless Bush continued to claim that Hussein was ‘a threat because he’s dealing with al-Qaeda’ more than a year later.

The Center for Public Integrity wrote that its “exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

Pelosi’s comment at the CNN Town Hall comes amid fallout from revelations of other lies by U.S. officials, as a Washington Post report on Monday based on thousands of confidential documents detailed how the U.S. government systematically misled the public about the War in Afghanistan.

Establishment Priorities

Critics argue that Pelosi’s statement reflects a twisted sense of priorities in which an offense against the electoral prospects of the Democratic party is more serious than systematically deceiving the public to start an illegal invasion that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions in public funds, cast the region into chaos and enabled the ascent of ISIS.

“Pelosi’s reasoning doesn’t make sense—starting a war based on a coordinated public lie is illegal, and therefore more than enough grounds for impeachment. Her comments illustrate a core problem with the Democrats’ view of impeachment: presidents can only be impeached when they mess with the two-party system,” argued Joe Virgillito of BTRtoday.

“Getting dirt on another member of the club, getting dirt on another elitist, that’s the real crime,” said Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski, mocking Pelosi’s reasoning. “Don’t go after our own. You want to bomb as many poor and innocent brown kids as you want, I’m not going to say anything. The second you try to go after one of our own in the club, now we’re coming for you. Doesn’t that say it all about Nancy Pelosi? There is no moral core there.”

Virgillito notes that the same dynamic guided Nixon’s impeachment, as the former president’s schemes to gain electoral advantage were deemed unacceptable by Democratic leaders, but his war crimes in Indochina were considered admissible. “Richard Nixon oversaw illegal bombing of Cambodia and aggressively ramped up American military presence in Vietnam, but was only impeached when his minions broke into the Watergate to steal Democratic documents,” wrote Virgillito.

Similarly, critics argue that Trump’s other offenses are more worthy of impeachment than his attempt to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate Biden’s son.

For example, critics argue that Trump’s family has illegally and unconstitutionally profited from maintaining a global real estate empire while he serves as president. The president has spent almost a third of his presidency at his own resorts at taxpayer expense, according to a report by Citizens For Ethics And Responsibility In Washington. Others point to his administration’s intentional worsening of conditions for migrant children as a humanitarian crime worthy of impeachment.

But while President Trump maintains that his offenses don’t warrant impeachment, even he believed that Bush should have been removed from office for lying to the public about Iraq. The president said in a CNN interview before the 2008 election that he was “very impressed” by the new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but that he was surprised she didn’t do more to impeach Bush for his war crimes:

“When she first got in and was named Speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. … I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. … It just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing, [impeaching him] for the [Iraq] war. … He got us into the war with lies.”

“President Bush says he’s religious. And yet 400,000 people, the way I count it, have died.” Trump continued: “Everything in Washington has been a lie. Weapons of mass destruction was a total lie.” An example of a lie? “[Bush] reads a book a week,” Trump said. “Do you think the president reads a book a week? I don’t think so.”