For a long time, most Democratic war cries have been based on lies: "Republicans hate minorities." "Republicans hate poor people." "Republicans hate women." "It was just about sex." And the list goes on.
As pernicious as those charges are, they're nothing to the newest lie: That somehow, the Bush administration manipulated and manufactured intelligence to justify going to war with Iraq. This lie, in particular, is as scary as it's misguided -- because its ultimate aim is to drive support for the war on terror so low that we lose it. Just like Vietnam.
Some opponents of the war have gone so far 'round the bend that they aren't capable of listening to reason. But just in case there are a few who will, here is a must read piece from The Wall Street Journal.
And here are some of its most important points:
• In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration's role, "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," (our emphasis).
• The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion," although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence.
• The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."
• Finally, last Friday, there was Mr. Fitzgerald: "This indictment's not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are--have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel."
This won't matter to those who are far gone into the fever swamps of paranoia. But for the rest of us -- and for the press, which keeps reporting even the most outlandish charges as if they had a shred of credibility -- the facts should matter.
Cross posted at www.CarolLiebau.blogspot.com