I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.Josh Marshall, over at Talking Points Memo had this to say about that:
Of course, Bush made the decision to overlook all the good intel -- not to mention the claims of those poor forgotten inspectors -- saying that Saddam wasn't really a threat at all, or certainly not one requiring the response Bush himself ordered.Or, as Senator Jay Rockefeller pointed out in his press release at the unveiling of his Senate Committee's Phase II report on Pre-war Intelligence:One overlooked thing about this is that not only Bush, but many supporters of the war -- Dems and liberal hawks included -- also have a vested interest in pretending that the good intel never existed and those inspectors never said what they said. Those inconvenient historical facts reflect rather badly on them, too. With so many opinion-makers having vested interests of their own in telling the story this way, history has been tidily rewritten, and Bush is able to make this claim without a peep of objection from his big-time network interviewer.
Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.Let me translate that last sentence: they were lying.
It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.
But Bush gets to rewrite history (with Charlie Gibson's help, of course) in saying that the intelligence was wrong. No sir, you were just lying about all the intelligence. There's a difference.
8 comments:
John K: Nope, if Bush was lying then so was Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and most of the Democrats in the House and Senate who took two votes to go to war. It is the Democrats like Biden who are trying to rewrite history.
John K: But what does it matter, they are all part of the Obama admin now and he has adopted the Bush doctrine as his. LMAO Yah buddy!
It is the President who is in charge of the agencies that produced the intelligence reports the Congress saw. And of course the atmosphere after 9/11 was that if you did not support the President you must be supporting terrorists.
Not that anyone is happy that the Democrats rolled over and played dead. Especially considering how the Republicans have shamelessly threatened filibuster and blocked a record number of votes since January 2007 in the Senate, after whining about how obstructionist the Democrats were previously.
So if Bush had encouraged the CIA to be open with him, if he had received and then presented Congress with intelligence that said there was a chance that Iraq had WMD but it was unlikely, does anyone think we should have gone to war. Since it turned out there were no WMD’s, do you think we should have gone to war in Iraq, John K.?
John K: Try again. Same intel reports that the Clinton admin used.
Hmmm...nice try, John K. But try again.
The Bush admin stovepiped intelligence and cherrypicked what they showed to members of Congress.
So, John K., you are saying the Bush administration, before deciding to go to war in Iraq in 2003, did not update its intelligence assessment of Iraq that dated back to the year 2000? That the Bush administration did not take a fresh look at the region, trying to find Al Qaeda and any additional threats, after 9/11?
So your choices are a Bush administration so incompetent it doesn't update its intelligence reports, or a Bush administration that ordered its intelligence agencies to find reasons to invade Iraq, to manufacture intelligence. Yes, Hillary Clinton didn’t read more than the summary of the intelligence report she was given, she shares some blame there.
By the way, you didn’t answer my question. Do you think the US should have gone to war in Iraq?
don't hold your breath waiting on an answer.
And how about Bush's answer that he didn't "anticipate" war and as president, he should have.
First, what a horrible notion that a President should expect a war. Being prepared is one thing, expecting one to happen for no reason whatsoever is both depressing and bizarre.
Second, and more importantly, how do you not anticipate a war that you chose to iniate? I'd like President Wunderkind to explain that one.
Perhaps what he really meant to say is that he didn't anticipate the attacks which led to the wars (of course, had he read that PDB, he would have anticipated the attacks).
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