Lies, Not Mistakes, Led to Invasion of Iraq
Jeb Bush definitely did us a favor: In attempting not to talk about the past, he ended up bringing back the discussion of the Iraq war, which many political and media figures have been trying to avoid. And of course they're still trying to avoid it - they want to make sure this just about the horse race, or about the hypothetical question of "if you knew what we know now."
But that formulation is itself an evasion, as Josh Marshall, Greg Sargent and Duncan Black have pointed out - each making a slightly different but crucial point.
First, as Mr. Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, recently wrote, the Iraq invasion was not a good faith mistake. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney didn't sit down with the intelligence community, ask for its best assessment of the situation and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option. They decided right at the beginning - even before the dust of 9/11 had settled - to use a terrorist attack by religious extremists as an excuse to go after a secular regime that, evil as it was, had nothing to do with that attack.
To make the case for the splendid little war that they wanted to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about weapons of mass destruction - because chemical weapons, which many believed Saddam Hussein had, are nothing like the nukes they implied he was working on - and insinuating the false claim that Saddam was behind 9/11.
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UnitedStates Marines stand guard outside a bakery in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2005,
two years after the US-led invasion of the country. (Photo: Joao Silva
for the New York Times)
