Former Bush Chief Of Staff: Obama Has Been Allowed 'To Mislead The American People For So Long'

A little more than a decade removed from a key Iraq War role, former George W. Bush Chief Of Staff Andrew Card has turned his attention to different matters.

In a Tuesday interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Card was asked about the backlash President Barack Obama has received over his messaging that Americans could keep their health care plans under Obamacare.

"Well, first of all, I fault not only the President but I fault the people around the President for allowing him to mislead the American people for so long," Card said. "His categorical statements were made not as a candidate but as a President of the United States and words do matter at the White House. And it's usually somebody in the White House that goes to the President and says, 'Mr. President, you said that but it's not entirely true. You've got to put a caveat around it.'"

Card served as White House Chief Of Staff from 2001-06 and was the man behind the August 2002 formation of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) -- an arm of the administration responsible for making the case to go to war. Back in June 2008, the Washington Post described WHIG's role through the lens of former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's bestseller, "What Happened," which makes a mention of how "caveats" were played in that conflict.

McClellan wrote that WHIG was not used to "deliberately mislead the public" but that the "more fundamental problem was the way [Bush's] advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people.

"As the campaign accelerated," he added, "caveats and qualifications were downplayed or dropped altogether. Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded."

Card resigned from his chief of staff post in March 2006. He was famously the man who broke the news to Bush of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.