Republicans Still Denying Bush Lied About Iraq

[n2doc]

By Jonathan Chait

As America hurtles toward a potential Bush-versus-Clinton dynastic rematch, no Democratic loyalists have yet come forward to insist that Bill Clinton was in fact speaking the truth when he denied having sexual relations with that woman. There is, however, a continual submerged effort to deny that George W. Bush’s administration misled the country into the Iraq War. Today, The Wall Street Journal op-ed page has Republican judge Laurence Silberman fiercely insisting that the Bush administration did not lie, and that the claim it lied is itself a calumny.

Silberman’s argument is a simplistic one aimed at confusing those who have already forgotten the basic sequence of events. Silberman argues that a bipartisan commission, which he co-chaired, investigated the matter, and found that the Bush administration was victimized by faulty intelligence. “Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was ‘dead wrong’ about Saddam’s weapons,” concludes Silberman. So, yes, mistakes happen, but intelligence failures happen, and the Bush administration cannot be blamed for dishonesty.

Silberman does not mention that the commission he chaired did not even investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence. Senate Republicans refused to allow the commission to investigate this matter, fearing it would harm Bush’s reelection prospects. Indeed, Silberman himself wrote in the report at the time, “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

This was a favorite line of pro-Bush spin. It is true that passing on faulty intelligence by mistake is not the same thing as misrepresenting intelligence. Bush's defenders habitually rebutted accusations of the latter by insisting that the former was true. In reality, both things happened — the administration suffered from honest intelligence failures, and it misled the public about the facts as it understood them.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/republicans-still-denying-bush-lied-about-iraq.html

[el_bryanto]

1. It's hard to prove. It seems clear that the administration knew the "right" answer

and ignored counter evidence. They may have believed the war with Iraq was a moral necessity, and that evidence that didn't support their contention was to be set aside as probably wrong and/or irrelevant. It seems likely, however, that they had less noble reasons for wanting to go to war; such as creating US control over the area and it's oil fields. The problem is that if you inclined to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt (as many apparently are), forcing the data to get a specific conclusion isn't so much a lie as it is a mistake.

Or to put it another way - they don't imagine Bush and Cheney saying "This evidence proves our case for war is fallicious, lets hide it." They imagine them thinking, "This evidences suggests that our case for war is wrong, but this info doesn't fit against the rest of the data, so it's probably wrong."

Bryant

[Downwinder]

2. Let a war Crimes tribunal sort it out.