One of the Power LIne philosophers, Paul Mirengoff, knows that the "intelligence" regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was not cooked. It was wrong, you see, but it wasn't any more wrong than the assessments of all our allies. An honest mistake that does not seem to bother Mr. Mirengoff over much.
One might wonder why, since all our allies concurred in the view that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, hardly any followed us to war. But it is not really such a great mystery. There was no reason to rely on intelligence. In November, 2002, Iraq had allowed the return of UN weapons inspectors onto its territory. They were conducting their searches in unfettered fashion and had turned nothing up when their work was ended by our invasion. If they had been allowed to continue their inspections, we would have found out, without a war, that Iraq did not have any weapons.
There was a decision to go to war in Iraq and to make Saddam's weapons the casus belli. The intelligence and facts were fixed to fit that policy. The weapons were just a plausible pretext. It's not that, had the "intelligence" been different, there would have been no war. There would have been a different pretext. It's not enough to say the intelligence was cooked. The entire process was cooked. First there was a decision for war, then an effort to find "intelligence" to justify it. The "intelligence" was never for decsion makers. It was for the rest of us. The decision had been made.
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