Tuesday night marked the 16th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. And former Bush administration mouthpiece Ari Fleischer, tweeting from the comforts of his own home rather than a cell in the Hague, had something very important to say about it. No, it wasn’t any variation of “I’m sorry.”
Instead, Fleischer tried his hand at a bit of Iraq War revisionism.
Counterpoint: Bush did lie, and many, many, many people died—in fact, we still don’t actually know how many.
From there, Fleischer attempted to pin the catastrophe that was the war completely on the intelligence community, which included not just the CIA but other American allies. And while the “intelligence community” has blood on its hands as well, the administration manipulated intelligence time and time again to provide a pretext for war.
Near the end of the thread, Fleischer went full galaxy brain:
What a damn genius! Saddam’s plan worked out masterfully, particularly the parts where his country was invaded, his government was toppled almost immediately, and he died by hanging. Fooled again!
But ultimately, Fleischer circled back to the real purpose of his disgraceful thread, on a day above any other where he should have been sitting in complete silence and thinking about his crimes:
Bush is a liar, Ari. And like every other cheerleader in the administration, from Donald Rumsfeld to Paul Wolfowitz, so are you. And if Ari Fleischer’s ability to pop up on Twitter every so often to engage in some post-9/11 revisionism (alongside his dumb jokes about being bald) isn’t proof that America is an abject failure at holding anyone in power remotely accountable for their crimes, I don’t know what is.