Kirchick (from today's (06.16 LA Times Op-Ed):

<a href=“http/.../la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,1817942.story>Bush never lied to us about Iraq</a>

Touring Vietnam in 1965, Michigan Gov. George Romney proclaimed American involvement there "morally right and necessary." Two years later, however, Romney -- then seeking the Republican presidential nomination -- not only recanted his support for the war but claimed that he had been hoodwinked.

"When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get," Romney told a Detroit TV reporter who asked the candidate how he reconciled his shifting views.

Romney (father of Mitt) had visited Vietnam with nine other governors, all of whom denied that they had been duped by their government. With this one remark, his presidential hopes were dashed.

The memory of this gaffe reverberates in the contemporary rhetoric of many Democrats, who, when attacking the Bush administration's case for war against Saddam Hussein, employ essentially the same argument. In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate's 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: "We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true." On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that "the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress."

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House "manipulation" -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: "Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses."

Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don't get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month's report, titled "Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information," includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats' lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.

"I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop communist aggression in Southeast Asia," Romney elaborated in that infamous 1967 interview. That was an intellectually justifiable view then, just as it is intellectually justifiable for erstwhile Iraq war supporters to say -- given the way it's turned out -- that they don't think the effort has been worth it. But predicating such a reversal on the unsubstantiated allegation that one was lied to is cowardly and dishonest.

A journalist who accompanied Romney on his 1965 foray to Vietnam remarked that if the governor had indeed been brainwashed, it was not because of American propaganda but because he had "brought so light a load to the laundromat." Given the similarity between Romney's explanation and the protestations of Democrats 40 years later, one wonders why the news media aren't saying the same thing today.

James Kirchick is an assistant editor of the New Republic.

"It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you've engaged in a propaganda campaign," he writes, "by noting that it worked."

ROFLMAO

Yes, the Bush Administration conflated financial pay-outs to the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers to support for the Muslim Brotherhood and yes, they juxtaposed 9-11 with Hussein at every opportunity, and yes, they pushed some pretty dubious intelligence with this yellow cake business and "mushroom clouds," but John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Senate democrats were not hoodwinked. They knew damn well where this was going and they knew all the caveats about the intelligence - the caveats that said there was zero chance he would use them on us and no practical way to hand them off to his enemies hiding in Pakistan, London and Frankfurt. They voted for that resolution to cover their asses for future elections or presidential runs. Hell, that's worse than what Bush did. At least he thought he was doing the right thing.

Dumb or cynical, what does it matter at this point? Now we just have to get to the business of extricating ourselves from a tough spot. When someone has an idea of how to do that – and I don’t mean the nebulous "victory" that McCain is selling, but something real – let me know. Until then, I’ll leave these complaints about intelligence to history.

The only way that the Bush administration could get the domestic political support necessary to go to war was by persuading the public that (1) Iraq was culpable for 9/11 through support for al Qaeda and (2) Iraq was in imminent possession of nuclear weapons and persuading the Congress of the latter.  All the rest was politically irrelevant.  Thus, there is not the slightest possibility that Bush would have been able to take the country to war but for his claim that Iraq was in imminent possession of nuclear weapons.  The idea that the country would have gone to war because of concern about chemical or biological weapons or terrorist ties without the nuclear element is a pure fiction concocted by war apologists like James Kerchick to justify the unjustifiable.

Neither (1) nor (2) was the case and the administration had no meaningful evidence to support either claim.  Did it tell the public that it was deeply concerned about both but had not the evidence to substantiate either supposition?  No.  It claimed that both were the case and that it had clear and convincing evidence of both because that was politically necessary to start the war.  Did Bush believe that he had justification for the war? No doubt he did, although we still do not know quite what that was.  Surely, it was not to enforce UN resolutions as Bush scoffed at the UN.  Can anyone imagine the country going to war in Iraq merely to enforce 16 UN resolutions?  Risible.  Maybe that would have been sufficient for Peretz and Kerchick and a handful of others, but it would not have been a reason for Americans to send their sons and daughters into battle.  Bush couldn't sell his war based on the things that were really motivating him so he made up the two fairy tales that are the only things that would have sufficed politically -- terrorism and nuclear weapons.

If Bush were tried for perjury for falsely claiming to have evidence he did not have and for holding out key evidence -- the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake --  that he already knew to have been falsified, he would be convicted.  Perjurers have been convicted and sent to prison on less.  Bush lied to the public and the Congress, or had Tenet and Powell and Cheney do it for him, in order to start an aggressive war for other, political reasons.

All that Kerchick's apologia succeeds in showing is that Senate Republicans were prepared to whitewash Bush in 2004 and are not prepared to condemn him in 2008.  So what?  Are the mendacious Republicans supposed to be our standard for honesty?  Kerchick is in just the right company.

It is a blatant falsehood to claim that the only fault lay in faulty intelligence, one that Kerchick and Peretz will continue to peddle ad nauseum to justify sending American soldiers to die for nothing.

You people just can't let it freaking go, can you? Got news for you - the majority of Americans don't buy into this misled crap and even if they did, they care less about the past than the future.  Keep talking about  this lies to get into this war.  Cause that's all you have to hit Bush with now that Iraq is doing well and it's the favored war (Afghanistan) that is turning out to be a problem.

Go to any lending library.  Look up archived NY Times articles in the fall and spring of 2003.  Not a single person, Democrat or Republican, MI5 or KGB, CIA or NSA, claimed that Hussein did not have WMDs or supported terrorism.  Democrats were privy to the exact same intelligence reports as Bush.  So enough with your retarded conspiracy theory schemes.  

Conspiracy nuts like you have existed since the dawn of time - from the nuts that said the US had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor, to the ones that say Bush brought down the twin towers.

Roid:  Your post reminds me of Chris Matthews's comments about Russert on the day Russert died.  Matthews, shaken, got animated.  He said that he "probably shouldn't say this" but will:  That he and Russert argued about the war, with Matthews asking Russert how he could support it.  His reply was "the nuclear thing."  Matthews said that that was what really galled him about the administration -- that they found the thing that would convince a regular guy like Russert even though it wasn't on the level, that they abused good people's trust and good faith.

jwl,

The Iraq war is going well?  Even if we "win it," which we won't if you define victory, as Bush now does, as a stable, non-violent Iraq under a central government, what will have been accomplished?  Absolutely nothing from the point of view of the United States.  Iraq was not a threat before the war and won't be after the war, except that it is highly likely to be more chaotic and therefore provide more opportunity for terrorists than it did when controlled by Saddam Hussein.  Iran, with a more friendly and infiltrated Shi'a regime in at least important parts of Iraq will be stronger.

This is called fighting terrorism with stupidity.  Indeed, the whole war is so absurd that even victory would leave us worse off than when we started.  You don't need a conspiracy theory for that.  You just need to be something other than an ideological hack.

As for WMDs and who believed what, that trick is played by neatly conflating biological and chemical weapons, which are not "weapons of mass destruction" at all although they are terrifying, with nuclear weapons.  If you want to claim that the Democrats knew that Bush was lying about the "evidence" he touted for an imminently nuclear-armed Iraq, the aluminum tubes and yellowcake plus a lot of handwaving, cite some evidence for the same or keep your obnoxious, boob insults to yourself.  Do you suppose that if the Bush administration had said the Iraq was believed to be still in pursuit of nuclear weapons but several years away that we would be at war there today?  Not a chance.

The reality of what occurred 2003 is that very few people were willing to believe that the President of the United States would intentionally lie to induce the United States into a war.  By giving the president the benefit of every doubt, people, inside Congress and amongst the public, were persuaded that we faced an imminent threat of a nuclear-armed Iraq.  Everything else was of only modest importance in adding to the sense of Hussein's malevolent intent -- as per Russert above.

But Bush was lying.  That only required a conspiracy of a few, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Feith and Wolfowitz, all as blinded by their ideology as Bush himself.

jwl,

The Iraq war is going well?  Even if we "win it," which we won't if you define victory, as Bush now does, as a stable, non-violent Iraq under a central government, what will have been accomplished?  Absolutely nothing from the point of view of the United States.  Iraq was not a threat before the war and won't be after the war, except that it is highly likely to be more chaotic and therefore provide more opportunity for terrorists than it did when controlled by Saddam Hussein.  Iran, with a more friendly and infiltrated Shi'a regime in at least important parts of Iraq will be stronger.

This is called fighting terrorism with stupidity.  Indeed, the whole war is so absurd that even victory would leave us worse off than when we started.  You don't need a conspiracy theory for that.  You just need to be something other than an ideological hack.

As for WMDs and who believed what, that trick is played by neatly conflating biological and chemical weapons, which are not "weapons of mass destruction" at all although they are terrifying, with nuclear weapons.  If you want to claim that the Democrats knew that Bush was lying about the "evidence" he touted for an imminently nuclear-armed Iraq, the aluminum tubes and yellowcake plus a lot of handwaving, cite some evidence for the same or keep your obnoxious, boob insults to yourself.  Do you suppose that if the Bush administration had said the Iraq was believed to be still in pursuit of nuclear weapons but several years away that we would be at war there today?  Not a chance.

The reality of what occurred 2003 is that very few people were willing to believe that the President of the United States would intentionally lie to induce the United States into a war.  By giving the president the benefit of every doubt, people, inside Congress and amongst the public, were persuaded that we faced an imminent threat of a nuclear-armed Iraq.  Everything else was of only modest importance in adding to the sense of Hussein's malevolent intent -- as per Russert above.

But Bush was lying.  That only required a conspiracy of a few, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Feith and Wolfowitz, all as blinded by their ideology as Bush himself.

JWL:

The "reality-based community," in which most people in the intelligence and scientific establishments live, has an invitation for you:  Come on home.

We went to war against Iraq based upon a carefully orchestrated and increasingly well documented campaign of deception and manipulation that played on 9/11-related fears.  A number of the participants in this charade are now talking about what they did.  Have a listen.  

GWB IS an intelligence failure.

jwl. Lots of people didn't believe saddam had wmd (ritter comes first to mind), or at least didn't think the evidence was there (not sure powell ever believed it), but yeah, no one put that on the teevee or typed it much in the MSM, hence their credibility has suffered mightily.

"I’ll leave these complaints about intelligence to history."

I think it's important to review what happened mpatrick, because there's tons of dead people now. Although  I'm not sure you disagree....

Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, wrote an op-ed piece for that paper last week demonstrating that the senate report actually substantiated the president's claims.  It is not enough for the left to say that he was wrong, or even stupidly wrong.  He must be a manipulator and a liar.   By all means keep it up; some of those millions who are tired to the death of this presidency may ask themselves whether they want to jump out of the Republican frying pan into the MoveOn soup.

The Senate intelligence committee released its two-part report this month exploring pre-war intelligence