DID THE Bush administration mislead the country in the run-up to the Iraq war? Yes, it did. Did the administration "mislead us into war?" No, not exactly. The CIA leak scandal has again placed those questions at the center of the national agenda. Unfortunately, almost nobody seems to be getting them right.
It is true that, leading up to the war, the White House exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq. Spencer Ackerman and John Judis showed this in exhaustive detail in a cover story in the New Republic in 2003. (In fact, Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby reveals that this article set Libby off to try to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who he suspected, correctly, was one of the article's sources.)
Bush and his minions made implausible charges about Iraq possessing unmanned aerial drones that could threaten the United States, that it had obtained aluminum tubes for use in processing uranium for nuclear bombs, and other wild charges. The administration either ignored intelligence analysts who discredited this evidence or intimidated them into silence.
This, to put it mildly, is bad. But some liberals and Democrats don't want to leave bad enough alone. They want to make the Bush administration's dishonesty the central explanation for what went wrong in Iraq.
Take, for instance, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's comments on CNN the other day. When asked if she was "duped," Feinstein replied: "Yes. And had I known then what I know now, I never would have cast that vote, not in 1,000 years. I read, re-read the intelligence, read the classified versions, tried to get briefings, read open source, listened to the speeches, did everything I could to inform myself, and when I cast that vote, I was convinced that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to this nation, with respect to biological weapons, with respect to an unmanned aerial vehicle that was capable of being launched with chemical or biological weapons aboard.
"None of that turned out to be true. And that's what bothers many of us, because we now believe that the impetus for the American use of force essentially was regime change, pure and simple. Not the cause that was sold to us, which was weapons of mass destruction and their immediate threat to our country."
If you are a liberal, you were probably nodding your head when you read that passage. Yet it is highly misleading. It turns out that nearly everything the administration said about the Iraqi threat was wrong. The vast majority of that wrongness, though, was attributable to honest mistakes.
