The president’s comments about an intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq is the closest he’s come to publicly reconsidering the invasion, said The Los Angeles Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
In a valedictory interview with ABC News, President Bush has come closer than ever to acknowledging that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake — but not close enough.
“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq,” Bush told Charles Gibson. Given that Bush previously has acknowledged that there were, in fact, no WMD in Iraq, and that Iraq had no connection with 9/11, the fair inference is that the war was unnecessary. Of course Bush can’t un-invade Iraq, but you don’t have to be capable of time travel to admit that discrediting the principal justification for war also discredits the war itself. Such an admission wouldn’t change the fact that US involvement in Iraq can’t be undone overnight. It doesn’t even undermine Bush’s argument that, once in Iraq, he had an obligation to “win.” It might seem churlish, at this late date, to ask Bush to make a frank confession that a war that has killed more than 4,200 Americans was based on a mistake. After all, other figures in Washington were misled about the WMD threat. It’s also possible that Bush believes that to admit he erred in invading Iraq would be to endorse the charge by his harshest critics that he deliberately deceived the American people about the threat posed by Hussein.
Still, welcome as his latest remarks are, they fall short of the recognition of reality that would have been cathartic for Bush and for the nation.
