The news this evening is that the latest report on US intelligence failures in Iraq is scathing in its condemnation of those failures. Translation: The CIA didn’t know that Iraq had gotten rid of its WMD, didn’t know anything, really, but pretended to know.
CBS says the President is terribly concerned. He will study the document to see what more can be done to bring US intelligence up to speed.
Well, that makes it clear, doesn’t it? I’d call it a slam-dunk. President Bush – poor guy - attacked Iraq under the mistaken impression that it possessed those weapons.
Bosh.
But that’s how that story will play for many Americans who don't remember and are not reminded of the facts by TV news.
They probably don’t remember, for example, Paul Wolfowitz trying to tell the Congress that WMD was not the "real" reason for the preventative war, (To his credit, he tried. To his shame, he never quite get it out.)
If you have followed the story closely, read the 9/.11 Commission report and the relevant books, you know the Administration had a pre-existing strategy - they would oust Saddam Hussein and thereby change the Middle East. That 9/11 gave them the pretext. All they had to do was wrap Iraq and al Qaeda into a single enemy and launch a phony "War on Terror."
Today’s report says, I gather, that the CIA told George W. Bush what George Tenet knew Bush wanted to hear. Anybody surprised? Why else was Tenet treated as a hero when he fell.
Incidentally, the Albuquerque Journal carried a different kind of story on the Iraq war today on its "state news" page.
Seymour Hersh spoke to hundreds at NMSU about the war. Hersh, who termed his talk a "downer," said, among other things:
"Iraqi elections, boycotted by the Sunnis and managed by a huge military presence, were not a triumph of democracy…." (That’s a Journal paraphrase.)
What? Disagreeing with the consensus? Who does he think he is?
Hersh also said the guerrilla war isn’t over, that Abu Ghraib and similar scandals have alienated many in the Muslim world and that President Bush is " …not reachable…He sees what he sees he believes what he believes, he’s in his own world."
Who are you going to believe, the Administration (and its Democratic sycophants) or Hersh. Well, they did commit Abu Ghraib, Guantamano and such. And denied responsibility, leaving a few non-coms to take the fall.
Hersh? He broke the Abu Ghraib story.
Your choice.
Me, I just thought I would offer some context for that "scathing" intelligence report..