Posted on 07/20/2004 4:58:16 PM PDT by renotse
When President Bush and Prime Minister Blair agreed to official investigations into the intelligence failures in the runup to the war, they did so reluctantly. They had to assume that there just might be something in the files that, once exposed, would damage them. In fact, the two reports -- the Senate Intelligence Committee Report in the United States and the Butler Report in Britain -- have rescued both leaders. What tipped observers off to the fact that the Senate report would help Bush was that Democrats on the committee began undermining their own report as soon as it was published. They had signed unanimously onto two conclusions that exculpated the president. First, that all the other intelligence services, including the French and the Russian, had believed Saddam Hussein to be building a WMD arsenal. And, second, that the Bush administration had not put pressure on the intelligence services to conclude that Saddam had WMDs. Democrats, such as Illinois's Dick Durbin, attached notes to the report, effectively retracting the latter conclusion. They advanced such ingenious arguments as the administration's public statements on Saddam constituted pressure on the CIA in themselves. Or that the administration should have pressured the CIA -- but been more skeptical of reports of Saddam's arms control violations!
These second thoughts, however, were too late. With the publication of the unanimous report, the Bush administration and the Senate Democrats were in the same boat. They had both voted for the war on intelligence that, even if it proved to be false, was the conventional wisdom of the entire intelligence world.
Following the Senate report, "Bush Lied" would have to be changed to the much less dramatic "Bush Was Sadly Misinformed (Just like Us.)" Even better news awaited Bush in the report of the senior British mandarin, Lord Butler, on the record of the British intelligence before the Iraq war. Butler's report is a typical British establishment product. It seems to exonerate everyone while making some extremely sharp criticisms under the mellifluous civil service prose.
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
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