March 14, 2010

Rove's revisionism on Iraq

By: AF Editors

Peter Feaver has a very interesting post up about the assertion in Karl Rove’s new book that “if the administration had known the true extent of Iraq’s WMD stockpile and programs it would not have pushed the use of force resolution in October 2002 and invaded in 2003.” In other words, if our intelligence were right, there would’ve been no invasion of Iraq.

As Peter points out, this is especially interesting because President Bush insisted in 2005 that he would’ve done exactly the same thing even if he knew the facts about Saddam’s arsenal. Then, in 2008, Bush seemed to waver when asked the same question. What will Bush say the next time he is asked?

Feaver agrees that if we had all the facts about the WMD, there would’ve been no war. I agree, too. It would’ve been hard to get Republicans behind the idea, let alone half of the Democrats in the Senate.

I’d also go one step further and say that Bush’s answer from 2005, also given by other Republicans, was more of a response to political pressure than a detached analytical judgment. (Memo to self: Make sure I didn’t make that same argument back in 2005. Also, hire an intern to read my archived posts from back then.)

Generally, I would expect liberals to be very happy about Rove’s contention that there would’ve been no invasion if the intelligence were better. Yet Frank Rich had this to say:

As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”

Wait, so Rich and Wilkerson would’ve been happier if Rove defended the invasion of Iraq as the right thing to do even if we knew the whole truth about Saddam’s WMD? I don’t recall too many liberals making that point while Bush was president. I guess the times they are a-changin’.