Revisionist history about the Iraq war

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12/14/2008

President Bush is trying mightily to rewrite the history of the Iraq war before his administration leaves power. He and members of his national security brain trust, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, would like to dispel the narrative that they misled the country into war. Instead, both Bush and Rice are trying to characterize the White House as the unwitting recipient of faulty intelligence.
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In recent interviews, both Bush and Rice have expressed regret that the prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction proved to be seriously flawed.

"I don't know - the biggest regret of all the presidency has to be the intelligence failure in Iraq," Bush said in an ABC interview when asked if there was one "do over" he would like to have. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein."

The president's attempt to disassociate himself from accountability for the phony pretext for war is simply outrageous. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were not just two guys in a crowd of "a lot of people" who were worried about Hussein's weapons capability. They were elevating the hysteria about Iraq at a time when some of this nation's most important allies were openly skeptical of U.S. claims of Hussein's weapons cache and capabilities. The Bush administration was sounding alarms - such as Rice's January 2003 suggestion that ceding to uncertainty might cause the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" - even though U.N. inspectors were coming up empty.

Most infamously, Bush's 2003 State of the Union address included the 16 words claiming that Hussein had tried to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium, even though red flags had been raised within the State Department about the veracity of the claims.

The best that can be said of the Bush White House is that it was insufficiently vigilant about scrutinizing the intelligence it presented to the world to justify a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that has cost more than 4,200 American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars a year - and incalculable damage to U.S. stature in the world. At worst, it was a campaign of deceit. Historians will be taking a close look at the substantial evidence that the Bush administration was determined to engage Iraq in war from the day it assumed power - and used the fear and confusion in the aftermath of 9/11 to sell this war to the public.

In another exit interview, Bush continued to defend the decision to go to war and argued that he has left Iraq on solid footing for his successor. He even claimed it improved U.S. relations with many foreign nations - a highly dubious contention.

History will not forget that the rationale for this war - which has brought so much death, debt and misery - was thoroughly discredited. The fault for that cannot be delegated to midlevel intelligence analysts.

It rests with the president.