New York Magazine: Was the Iraq War a Crime or a Mistake? Yes.
[img]
[/img]
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. “I still say it was not a mistake,” says Marco Rubio, “because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”
Liberal critics reject the honest-mistake explanation. “The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong,” replies Paul Krugman, “America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war.” 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’s intelligence manipulation in such a way as to help it, and its defenders, evade the truth.
It is true that western intelligence agencies badly overestimated Iraq’s weapons capability before the invasion. The Clinton administration, France, Hans Blix, among other sources, all suspected Saddam Hussein of continuing to harbor weapons of mass destruction. They all suffered from a widespread intelligence failure.
The Bush administration’s 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. “Republicans 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,” reported the New York Times 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’s culpability. “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,” noted the Robb-Silberman report.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/was-the-iraq-war-a-crime-or-a-mistake-yes.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Even their election was a crime.
