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<\/div>Pretty much everybody in American politics now agrees that the Iraq War was not a great idea. The source of disagreement has moved, instead, to a different question: Was it a failure, or a crime? Republicans insist the Bush administration was merely the victim of bad intelligence. \u201cI still say it was not a mistake,\u201d says<\/a> Marco Rubio, \u201cbecause the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n Liberal critics reject the honest-mistake explanation. \u201cThe Iraq war wasn\u2019t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong,\u201d replies Paul Krugman<\/a>, \u201cAmerica invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war.\u201d And the liberal critics are correct that the war was not merely an honest mistake. But they have framed their indictment of the Bush administration\u2019s intelligence manipulation in such a way as to help it, and its defenders, evade the truth.<\/p>\n It is true that western intelligence agencies badly overestimated Iraq\u2019s weapons capability before the invasion. The Clinton administration<\/a>,France<\/a>, Hans Blix<\/a>, among other sources, all suspected Saddam Hussein of continuing to harbor weapons of mass destruction. They all suffered from a widespread intelligence failure.<\/p>\n The Bush administration\u2019s strategy from the outset has been to hide behind this failure of intelligence. In 2004, Republicans in Congress insisted that an investigatory panel could only delve into the ways in which the intelligence community failed, and not how the White House manipulated intelligence. \u201cRepublicans have used their political control over both houses of Congress to focus inquiries by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees almost solely on the judgments reached by intelligence agencies rather than on the public statements issued by the White House or the administration itself,\u201d reported<\/a> the New York Times<\/em> in February, 2004. Instead, the Republicans allowed for a commission, chaired by Democrat Chuck Robb and Republican Laurence Silberman, that would avoid judging the administration\u2019s culpability. \u201cOur 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,\u201d noted<\/a> the Robb-Silberman report.<\/p>\n Republicans all along have deflected the accusation about Bush falsifying intelligence by turning it into a question of failed intelligence. In 2005, David Brooks wrote a witheringly condescending column<\/a> portraying Reid as an unhinged conspiracy theorist because he accused the administration of falsifying its Iraq intelligence. In his column, Brooks cited numerous officials from outside the Bush administration who believed Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, Brooks concluded, only a conspiratorial loon would suspect Bush of manipulating the intelligence. (Brooks\u2019s column repeatedly describes Reid as \u201cwriting important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes.\u201d)<\/p>\n A second report, the \u201cPhase II report<\/a>,\u201d which came out in 2008, did investigate the administration\u2019s manipulation of intelligence. Its verdict was clear: \u201cthe Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.\u201d Incredibly, conservatives have continued to portray the Iraq intelligence question as a simple innocent failure. \u201cBush\u2019s critics, both the dishonest and the foolish, called him a liar for the mistake. But as the 2005 bipartisan Robb-Silberman report on the intelligence leading up to the war noted, it was the CIA\u2019s \u201cown independent judgments \u2014 flawed though they were \u2014 that led them to conclude Iraq had active WMD programs,\u201d argued a Wall Street Journal<\/em> editorial. This wasn\u2019t from 2005. This editorial ran last week<\/a>!<\/p>\n In his column today<\/a>, Brooks also cites Robb-Silberman as proof that the Bush administration did not manipulate intelligence. “There\u2019s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war,” he writes. “That doesn\u2019t gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with\u00a0<\/span>the Robb-Silberman report from 2005\u00a0<\/span>knows that this was a case of human fallibility.” 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.<\/em><\/p>\n The trouble is that critics like Krugman are also presenting the crime-versus-mistake question in mutually exclusive terms. \u201cThe public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that,\u201d argues Krugman. This case unwittingly abets the Bush administration\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Was the Iraq War a Crime or a Mistake? Yes. By Jonathan Chait Stop it — you’re both right! Photo: Uriel Sinai\/Getty Images Pretty much everybody in American politics now agrees that the Iraq War was not a great idea. … Continue reading
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