Caught in his own lies.

George Bush's Iraq scandal is not going away any time soon. His Administration lied six ways to Sunday to browbeat the American public into going along with the war. Now those lies have finally caught up with him, and he is hopelessly entangled in their web, even as he spins more strands.

With U.S. soldiers dying at the appalling rate of one a day in Iraq, those lies are unsustainable. They haunt surviving family members, and they indict our democratic system of checks and balances.

The lies, exaggerations, and distortions go way beyond the one in his State of the Union address about uranium from Africa, though that was a whopper.

There was the lie that the Administration believed Saddam already possessed nuclear weapons.

There was the exaggeration that Saddam had vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent," Bush said in his State of the Union address. Where is it all?

There was the lie that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda. When Bush was asked point-blank at his July 30 press conference about the links he had drawn between Al Qaeda and Saddam, all that Bush could say was, "It's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered." That just doesn't cut it.

There was the lie that Saddam's weapons presented a direct threat to the United States. Even CIA Director George Tenet said it was highly unlikely that Saddam would use them against the United States unless Washington invaded (and still he didn't use them).

There was the lie about aluminum tubes, which Condoleezza Rice said were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." Actually, many intelligence experts, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that the tubes were more likely to be used for artillery rockets.

There was the lie about Saddam's unmanned aircraft. On October 7, Bush warned the nation about a growing fleet of these aircraft that could be used "for missions against the United States." Turns out these aircraft were hardly formidable. They appear to be "made of balsa wood and duct tape, with two small propellers attached to what look like the engines of a weed whacker," the AP reported in March.

And there was the lie that the Administration exhausted all means to resolve the conflict peacefully. Anyone who watched the U.N. Security Council debate knows that the United States stymied efforts to bring more weapons inspectors on board and to allow Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei time to complete their work.

At his July 30 press conference, Bush fobbed off other questions about the flimsy claims he peddled in the lead-up to the war. "In order to placate the critics and cynics about the intentions of the United States, we need to produce evidence," he said. "And I'm confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe: that Saddam had a weapons program. I want to remind you he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one time, which is pretty tangible evidence."

Note the subtle shift to "weapons programs" and away from the weapons themselves. It's much easier for Bush to say he will find evidence of "weapons programs" than to find the weapons themselves.

Note also that while Bush and Rice before the war talked about not wanting to wait until a "smoking gun turns into a mushroom cloud"--a clear allusion to the threat of Saddam's nuclear arsenal--Bush avoided the subject of Saddam's nuclear weapons entirely at the press conference.

Vice President Dick Cheney was even more brazen. Cheney surfaces only to break ties in the Senate, raise money for Republican candidates, or speak before such cozy audiences as the American Enterprise Institute, where he appeared on July 24.

There, he repeated the lie that "every measure was taken to avoid a war," that "it was Saddam Hussein himself who made war unavoidable," and that Bush launched the war only "when all else failed." Then he recycled some of the old propaganda about Saddam's threat--"a menace to our future peace and security." One thing Cheney did not recycle, however, was his own claim, back on March 16, that "we believe he [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Instead, Cheney had the chutzpah to quote a National Intelligence Estimate that said, "If left unchecked, it [Iraqi probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Which is it, Mr. Vice President?

Back in March, you said you believed he already had nuclear weapons. Now you're saying he was several years off?.

Cheney's got a lot of nerve.

Either he doesn't think anyone remembers what he said just four months previously, or he thinks that merely to put the three words together--Saddam, nuclear, and weapons--and then rinse and repeat is all it takes to persuade Americans that Iraq was the "grave" or "gathering" or "unique" threat that Bush and Cheney falsely said it was all along.

Cheney, who didn't take questions from his cronies at the American Enterprise Institute, has not answered for his own deceit, which played a big part in pushing the United States into war.

Instead, he acts as though he--and Bush--did nothing wrong.

Even for Cheney, this was an embarrassingly cynical performance.

After using lies and deception to justify the invasion, Bush is resorting to them again to characterize the occupation. Chief among these is that the resistance to the U.S. occupation consists of a "few remaining holdouts" of the Ba'ath regime, as Bush said on July 22, or "the violent remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, joined by terrorists and criminals," who are "making a last attempt to frighten the Iraqi people," as he put it in his news conference. Bush suggested that after U.S. forces killed Qusay and Uday Hussein, the attacks would fade. "That changes attitudes in Iraq," he said at his press conference. He also, as is his wont, said, "Saddam's sons were brought to justice"--repeating his equation of justice with liquidation.

Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute made a similar case. "There are still some holdouts of the regime, joined by terrorists from outside the country," he said.

While some of the opposition may come from people who refused to get out of the Ba'ath Party, much of it appears to flow from two other sources: Iraqi nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.

If the Bushies think these sources will all of a sudden dry up, they're kidding themselves.

Two days before Bush eliminated Saddam's notorious sons (and a grandson, by the way, along with a bodyguard), thousands of Shiites held a demonstration denouncing the United States.

They shouted, "No to America, no to colonialism, no to tyranny, no to the devil," according to The New" York Times.

Remember, these were Shiites, and the Shiites were supposed to welcome their "liberation." They weren't natural Saddam lovers. Saddam, a Sunni, had long oppressed them.

Some Shiite clerics are now telling their followers that they have a religious obligation to resist the U.S. occupation.

"The potential rise of Islamist resistance, both Sunni and Shia, ought to be worrying the Americans more than the issue of the discredited Hussein family," wrote Jonathan Steele in The Guardian on July 25.

Then there is the nationalism that swells when people see their country occupied by a foreign power, especially a foreign power that did so much to ravage their land in two wars and more than a decade of punitive sanctions.

Plus, the vaunted U.S. military has not yet been able to provide the rudiments of clean water, adequate food, and electricity to the Iraqi people. On July 3, U.S. forces were attacked in three places, which "suggested that sapping the resistance might not be as simple as capturing or killing Mr. Hussein," reported the Times. "The attacks occurred in diverse locations: a Sunni area west of Baghdad that staunchly supported the former government, a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad that did not, and the center of the city." After the assault in central Baghdad, a crowd gathered and shouted, "God bless Muhammad," the Times wrote. One man said, "It's not because of Saddam that people are doing these things. It is because there's no government, there's no electricity, and just false promises."

On top of everything else, some U.S. troops, who have been put in a terrible situation, may have been ordered to use brutal tactics that further alienate the population.

Amnesty International issued a memorandum on July 23 that discussed "possibly unlawful killings of demonstrators" and "reports of torture or ill-treatment by Coalition Forces."

U.S. forces, in at least one incident, used a tactic that the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibit. Colonel David Hogg, commander of the Second Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division, told The Washington Post that "his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: 'If you want your family released, then turn yourself in.' "

U.S. forces have also not spared the innocent in the Saddam manhunt. "Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday [July 27] into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to eleven, including two children, their mother, and crippled father," Robert Fisk reported for The Independent. "At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants." One doctor treating the victims told Fisk: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."

The day before, in Karbala, "a thirty-year-old cafeteria worker was shot during a confrontation between soldiers and an unruly crowd," the Times reported. "During the man's funeral, mourners chanted, 'There is no God but God, and America is the enemy of God.' "

These are the factors that are contributing to what even the chief U.S. military commander in Iraq, General John P. Abizaid, admits is a "guerrilla war." This, just two weeks after Donald Rumsfeld said, "I guess the reason I don't use the phrase guerrilla war is because there isn't one."

Bush should pull U.S. troops out of Iraq. They never belonged there in the first place. They are not welcome there now. They are 146,000 sitting ducks. The obvious option is to turn the entire operation over to the United Nations, which has some experience in what Bush used to sneeringly call "nation-building." But the hardliners in the Bush Administration still don't want to deal with the United Nations.

Cheney and Wolfowitz are resisting Colin Powell's effort even to get U.N. blessing for other countries' troops to come in.

This should be a no-brainer.

Going to the United Nations would relieve tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

But for Cheney and Wolfowitz, that's not a good enough reason. They would rather sacrifice more U.S. troops than let the United Nations take a primary role.

Why?

Because they view the United Nations as an impediment to U.S. global rule. And they don't want to let any other country in on the spoils of Iraq. Giving the United Nations a larger role might jeopardize the ability of U.S. companies to get the inside track on future contracts.

"Wolfowitz said the Administration would welcome a new United Nations resolution to attract peacekeepers ... but only if it did not restrict the authority of L. Paul Bremer III, the senior American civil administrator in Iraq," the Times reported. In testimony before Congress on July 29, Wolfowitz said, "I'd be very enthusiastic about the right kind of resolution, and very concerned about the wrong kind."

As a substitute, the Pentagon is now feverishly trying to train an Iraqi militia to do some of the work for the U.S. troops. Just as President Nixon tried his Vietnamization program to get the locals to do the fighting for us, Wolfowitz said, "We don't need more American troops. What we need most of all are Iraqis fighting with us."

But that's a tall order. Anthony Cordesman is a military specialist for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. You might have seen him on television during Gulf War I or II with his pointer. Even he warns that "the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf War," this time "against the Iraqi people."

That is nothing to look forward to, and no amount of lies or blandishments will make it so.