TNR Editor: “Bush Never Lied To Us About Iraq”
Just when I start losing hope that anyone in the liberal media will ever be honest again, the unexpected happens. The New Republic is one of the many liberal rags that this blog and others have been pretty hard on at times. However, one assistant editor in particular at TNR needs to be called out today for his exceptional honesty.
James Kirchick wrote an incredibly honest and accurate piece in today’s L.A. Times that must be causing him a significant amount of grief with his far-left colleagues. Kirchick details why the narrative that “Bush lied” is completely false.
Highlights:
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.”
That’s only a small part and I encourage everyone to read the entire article. It’s about time someone on the left was honest about the whole “bush lied” nonsense. There’s no question we were wrong about Saddam having stockpiles of WMD, but nobody “lied.”
Thanks to Newsbusters for pointing out this story, it’s an important one.
-Chris Jones
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chris,
i think the real issue here is not that the intelligence community distorted evidence, or that the administration pressured them to change their judgments, but that the administration cherry-picked the intelligence, including uncorroborated and discredited reports, to make their case to go to war.
yellowcake? curveball?
powell’s powerpoint?
no, it seems very clear to me that the administration was set on taking down the iraqi government and sought out and used anything they could find to “make a case” to persude others to go along.