GOP/Media Rewrite Iraq War History by Robert Parry

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and radio personality Jay Diamond are right to wonder why Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney got away with rewriting a key chapter of the Iraq War history without political reporters raising a peep.

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At the June 5 Republican debate, co-sponsored by CNN, Romney defended George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the grounds that Saddam Hussein refused to let United Nations weapons inspectors in to search for WMD.

If Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction,” the war might have been averted, the former Massachusetts governor said.

But the reality is that Hussein did open up his country through the fall and winter of 2002-03, giving Hans Blix and his U.N. inspection team free rein to check out suspected WMD sites. It was President Bush who forced the U.N. inspectors out in March 2003 so his invasion could proceed.

The answer to the media question of why the U.S. press corps didn’t object to Romney’s bogus account is that Washington journalists have accepted this revisionist history since Bush began lying about the facts in July 2003.