You and I are typically on the same page, and I appreciate your well-reasoned perspective, but I strongly disagree here. There were significant overstatements and mischaracterizations by the Bush admin to justify an invasion. In some instances, there were just flat out lies by people in the Bush admin. The ability of Iraq to employ its imaginary weapons of mass destruction outside of its own country were proven negligible in the decade plus since Desert Storm. The cost-benefit analysis weighed heavily against committing American troops on the ground in Iraq. And then once the regime was toppled, we had no good plan regarding what to do there. We were not prepared for regime change, and the costs that would come with it. That has been proven.whiterock said:Intel does not dictate policy. It informs policy-makers.Mothra said:Osodecentx said:You're missing my point. Both can be true.Mothra said:You're missing my point. Both can be true. Tenet may have overstated the evidence of WMDs to the admin, while at the same time the admin misrepresented the intelligence to the public, and used it as pretext to go to war. One does not preclude the other. That's what you seem to be missing.Osodecentx said:Do we really want to do this?Mothra said:
I am not sure how Tenet's admission to faulty intel supports Bush/Cheney's purposeful misrepresentations of the evidence they were provided. That evidence does not contradict anything the Vox report stated. How do you explain that?
I made my judgement based on what the CIA told Bush. The testimony of the witnesses in the room convinced me.
The administration had bad intel and acted in good faith to protect the world.
One does not preclude the other. That's what you seem to be missing.
You've made your judgement. I've made mine. Do we want to derail a decent thread?
I am not missing that point at all. I agree that the admin can have bad intel and act in good faith. My point is that's not what the evidence shows occurred. The evidence shows that the admin misrepresented the intel to the American public - to the shock of its generals.
To buy your position that it was all just an innocent mistake, one has to ignore the evidence presented in the vox article. I suppose that's exactly what you're going to do - ignore the evidence that doesn't fit your narrative.
I agree with you that the cia gave the bush admin bad intel. But the evidence also shows that the Bush admin and your boy Cheney still lied to the American public about the intel they were given to garner support for a war. That's not only a proven fact, but it's despicable - far worse than anything trump has done IMO.
Yes, intel overstated WMD inventory. But inventory was frankly not the key issue. Capability was the key issue. and Saddam had actually used WMDs on his own people, so capability was a given, something intel did not at all indicate had been lost.
Big mistake of the war was political, in allowing the narrative to focus on securing inventory rather than destroying capability. We actually did the latter, which was the more important need.
On W's desk was two sets of intelligence. One, which said Saddam didn't have much inventory anymore, was in a manila folder about a quarter-inch thick, mostly from a defector who re-defected. The other set, which went on into great detail about WMD production facilities, scientists, stores of raw materials, supply chain details, etc..... was in floor-to-ceiling stacks that occupied half the room. And then, as the 9/11 Commission report noted, there loomed Al Qaeda, who was reaching out to Saddam, because he had WMDs. This intel said Saddam was intrigued, as he had tried to attack the US before and failed (noted above) but AQ had demonstrated an ability to hit America hard where it hurt. So the real threat was the looming marriage of the WMD capability of an Iraqi regime with the operational capability of AQ to deliver those weapons. As W looked past those two sets of papers at the TV on his wall which showed bodies being brought out of the smoldering rubble of the WTC, he had no choice. He could not risk it. There was no need to risk it. Iraq was not the Soviet Union. We faced no deterrence from invasion other than cost/benefit calculations. We had to act against the threat of allowing a world-wide terror group that had just attacked us to gain proximity to state-owned WMD capability, by removing the piece of that equation we could more easily remove in the shortest period of time = Saddam.
If you had been sitting in W's chair, you would have made the same decision. and it would have been the right one.
Reports are that Bush was heavily influenced by Cheney and Rumsfeld to invade. It was a poor decision that got thousands of Americans killed, and his admin owns that. I remember thinking at the time, Afghanistan was a good idea. They harbored the organization responsible for 9/11. But Iraq? I am not so sure about that.