Quote of the Week (And Why We Cannot Let The GOP Re-Write Iraq War History)

"[Jeb Bush's] first answer to Megyn Kelly’s question was the most honest one. Yes, knowing what we know now, he would still have invaded Iraq and he has the team of dunces to prove it."

- Ambassador Joe Wilson, commenting on Jeb Bush's recent flip-flopping on the Iraq question, and noting that Jeb has now surrounded himself with some of the very same idiots who lied this country into a war with Iraq in the first place.

Wilson's op/ed addresses what has really been bothering me this past week concerning Jeb's recent Iraq fiasco, and it has little to do with what Bush said and more to do with how the GOP is using his misstatements in an attempt to re-write history.

The Iraq Debacle was not a failure in intelligence, as Republicans continue to claim.  As Ambassador Wilson states, "deliberate political abuse and fabrication of intelligence" are what actually got us in to that clusterfuck twelve years ago:

The deliberately cherry-picked intelligence was concocted in order to influence the decision that led to the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Americans, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the quagmire in the Middle East in which we have been enmeshed for the past decade. As the head of British intelligence reported back to his government after meetings in Washington in June, 2002: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Alan Foley, the Director of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) told his people in late 2002 or early 2003: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.”

Although I am certain the Republican Party wants us to forget all of this, here are some of the high points of the Bush/Cheney fuckery that got us into Iraq:

• Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," even though there was no evidence that Saddam had an active nuclear program -- Christ, Saddam's own son-in-law, prior to the U.S. invasion, told us after he defected that there was no Iraqi nuclear program and another high level defector similarly told the U.S. that Iraq had absolutely no active weapons of mass destruction program.


• Remember the "high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production" that Saddam reportedly possessed and that George W. Bush referred to in his 2003 State of the Union?  That was all horseshit, and BushCo knew it was horseshit at the time they made the claim.


• In a 2001 interview, Dick Cheney said, "It's been pretty well confirmed that (9-11 ring leader Mohammed Atta) did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in (the Czech Republic) last April, several months before the attack."  Such a meeting, however, did not happen, and Cheney knew that.


• The Bush Regime was constantly linking Saddam to al-Qaeda (and thus to the 9-11 Attacks), even though no such link existed and in fact Saddam and bin Laden were "natural enemies."

This is just a taste of the panoply of lies that resulted in the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder of all time, and the last thing Americans should do is allow the GOP to re-write the history on this.  

As readers of this blog know, I've never really forgiven Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  She has since admitted that her vote to invade was a mistake, but she needs to go much further on this.  

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Put the turd in their pocket, Hillary.

UPDATE:  Right on cue:

"The question was whether it was a mistake, and my answer was it was not a mistake. I still say it was not a mistake, because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ... [Bush] made the right decision based on what he knew at that time. We learned subsequently that information was wrong. My answer is, at the time, it appears the intelligence was wrong."

- Marco Rubio, on this morning's Fox News Sunday.