Ex-German leader: Bush lying about Iraq in new book

By David Edwards

Former President George W. Bush just isn't telling the truth, says one ex-world leader in a position to know.

In his new book Decision Points, Bush claims that former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder offered him full-fledged support should he decide to invade Iraq.

Bush wrote that Schroeder told him, "What is true of Afghanistan is true of Iraq. Nations that sponsor terror must face consequences. If you make it fast and make it decisive, I will be with you."

"The former American president is not telling the truth," Schroeder told the German newspaper Der Spiegel Tuesday.

"I took that as a statement of support," Bush wrote. "But when German elections arrived later that year, Schroeder had a different take. He denounced the possibility of using force against Iraq."

Schroeder said that the meeting with Bush actually was more about whether Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

"Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq ... prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al Qaeda fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US," Schroeder said.

"This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed."

Schroeder is the second former official of a foreign government to accuse the president of fibbing in his new book.

Kim Howells, an ex-minister in Britain, threw cold water on claims that waterboarding saved British lives.

"Where I doubt what President Bush has said is that this, what we regard as torture, actually produced information which was instrumental in preventing those plots coming to fruition. I'm not convinced of that," Howells said.

Mother Jones' David Corn accused Bush of engaging in a "spin operation" about Iraq's WMD capacity.

"He's also engaging in a whole another spin operation now," said Corn on MSNBC's Hardball Monday. "He has said that 'We had to take Saddam out, it was good we took him out because Saddam had a capacity to build WMDs.' Not that he had them, that he had a capacity."

"His own inspectors, Charles Duelfer who led the Iraq survey group, that went in after the invasion, they produced a report in 2004 saying there was nothing, no capacity, that Saddam Hussein had shut everything down years earlier. So Saddam was in no position to pursue, develop, create, produce any sort of weapons of mass destruction."