My only gripe is with that last line about it being a "new addition"; Kerry was pulling that shit in 2004 and Clinton in 2008. It's only new to Republicans, who are just now catching up with the Democrats' decade-plus of bullshit rationalizations.
Evanier's linked a few articles responding to those who would like to rewrite history --
revisionist historians is what I like to call 'em -- and pointing out that no, motherfuckers, there was ample evidence that the case for war was bullshit back in 2002 and 2003.
Josh Marshall:
Sorry. Iraq Wasn't a Good Faith Mistake. It Was Based on Lies.Some of this was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. Some was only obvious to reporters covering the story who were steeped in the details. And some was only obvious to government officials who in the nature of things controlled access to information. But in the tightest concentric circle of information, at the White House, it was obviously all a crock at the time.
While it is true that "WMD" was a key premise for the war, the sheer volume of lies, willful exaggerations and comically wishful thinking are the real story.
As a member of "anyone who was paying attention" -- and one who was 18-19 years old during the runup to the war -- I've always found it extremely insulting when Democrats pulled this "But we couldn't have known!" bullshit.
Well, yes, you could have known. Because
I knew. I was just some kid with an Internet connection, and you were
a goddamn United States Senator.
And while I'll grant that Senators (and the press) were privy to details I wasn't, I think it's extremely clear that they also weren't asking the same questions I was. The questions they
should have been asking were "Is this evidence conclusive?", "Is this source reliable?", "What do the people who favor going to war have to gain by lying?", "Are these people who have wanted to go to war with Iraq for decades and would accept any possible rationale to push that agenda?", and "What are the consequences if this information is wrong?" The questions they
were asking seem, mostly, to have been along the lines of "Will this help me get elected President?" Or in the reporters' cases, "Will this help me keep my access to the White House?"
It is very important to remember that before we invaded, Saddam Hussein actually did allow inspectors back into the country, thus undermining the key argument for following through with the threat of invasion in the first place. But the critical point is that we didn't invade Iraq because we had "faulty" intelligence that Iraq still had stockpiles of sarin gas. The invasion was justified and sold to the American public on the twin frauds of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance and the Saddam's supposedly hidden nuclear program. As much as the White House and the key administration war hawks like Vice President Cheney tried to get the Intelligence Community to buy into these theories, they never did. And to anyone paying attention, certainly anyone reporting on these matters at the time, it was clear at the time this was nonsense and a willful deception.
Judith Miller's been making her "It Was An Honest Mistake" book tour, and did about as well on The Daily Show the other week as she could under the circumstances. She's not wrong that there were people in the intelligence community worried about Saddam's stockpiles chemical weapons. She's just wrong about pretty much everything else.
Matt Taibbi:
Forget What We Know Now: We Knew Then the Iraq War Was a JokeI don't believe that most of the otherwise smart people who supported the war back then, from Hillary Clinton to the editorial boards of our major newspapers, bought any of this. What did happen is that a lot of people got caught up in the politics of the situation and didn't have the backbone to opt out. They didn't want to look weak, un-American, or "against the troops," at least not in public, so they sat out the debate and got behind the president.
That's why the lambasting of Jeb Bush by all of these media voices grinds a little. At least plenty of Republicans sincerely thought the war was a good idea. But I know a lot of my colleagues in the media saw through the war from day one.
And, for a little bit of balance, Jonathan Chait:
Was the Iraq War a Crime or a Mistake? Yes.The trouble is that critics like Krugman are also presenting the crime-versus-mistake question in mutually exclusive terms. “The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that,” argues Krugman. This case unwittingly abets the Bush administration’s defense. After all, if the debate is whether the intelligence was manipulated or flawed, the Bush administration can supply plenty of evidence for the latter. The Bush administration was the victim of bad intelligence, but also the perpetrator. Its defense lies in pretending that those two things cannot both be the case.
Chait (who, as Taibbi points out, said "I don't think you can argue that a regime change in Iraq won't demonstrably and almost immediately improve the living conditions of the Iraqi people" in 2003) acknowledges, as Marshall does, that there were intelligence sources who overestimated Iraq's weapons capabilities (though he uses the "WMD" blanket term which, as Marshall points out, is bullshit, as it doesn't strike a clear distinction between the chemical weapons Saddam had in the 1980's and the nuclear weapons he absolutely did not have in 2003), but also points out that this fact has been trotted out as if it
negates allegations that the Bush Administration lied about Iraq's weapons capabilities.
This is how the dodge works. Step 1: Prevent a Senate report from looking into whether the administration lied. Step 2: Ignore the existence of the report that did show the administration lied. Step 3: Pretend that an intelligence failure and a deliberate effort to cook the intelligence are mutually exclusive. It was a mistake, therefore it could not have also been a crime.