I Know I Seem to Be Beating A Dead Horse On The Matter of the GOP Iraq War Re-Write . . .

. . . but I am continually writing on this subject because the metaphorical horse in question appears to be far from dead.  As recently as two weeks ago, I honestly thought that the question of whether Bush and Cheney manipulated intelligence in order to get the war they wanted was answered long ago and the answer was that they most definitely lied this country into war.

But I spoke to a friend yesterday who will go unnamed (Dan), and he had read David Brooks' recent column on how the Iraq Debacle was basically an honest mistake and Dan more or less bought into Brooks' argument (Dan, by the way, was no fan of the Bush/Cheney Administration and keeps himself well-informed on the issues). In my friend's defense, why not buy into what Brooks had to say? After all, not only is he a New York Times columnist, but he is also one of the more thoughtful conservative writers out there.

No doubt the following paragraph from Brooks' piece sounded particularly convincing to Dan:

* * * There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

That doesn’t gibe (sic) with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”

Sounds pretty convincing, right? The only problem with what Brooks wrote is that it is complete, unadulterated horse-shit. Simon Maloy at Salon provides the one detail that Brooks either forgot about (unlikely) or intentionally ignored (very likely):

The Robb-Silberman report was not “exhaustive” – the commission was specifically instructed not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers. That task fell to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that George W. Bush and his closest advisers regularly made definitive statements about Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism ties that were either unsubstantiated by available intelligence or didn’t reflect disputes within the intelligence community.

Yeah, you read that right -- Brooks used a specific report to support his position that there was no intelligence manipulation by policymakers, even though the writers of that report were specifically told not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers.  Given that I could not believe Brooks would be so duplicitous careless, I actually followed Brooks' own link to the Robb-Silberman report, clicked through to the report's actual text, and found this in the introduction:

"[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information."

I naively hoped that the GOP (with the exception of Dick Cheney, of course) had finally decided to stop lying about Iraq.  I had also hoped that the New York Times had learned something from the Judith Miller Fuckery and actually started paying attention to what its writers were writing, particularly on the issue of the Iraq War and how we got into that quagmire in the first place.  I am now forced to conclude that Republicans will never stop lying about the Iraq Debacle and that the New York Times still has a lot of work to do.