Last week, a spokesman for Jeb Bush, who used to be governor of Florida and is now vacuuming up as much dark money as he can without actually announcing a run for president, tried to unspin a comment Mr. Bush made in a private gathering that suggested he was taking advice about the Middle East from his brother, former President George W. Bush.
Since it’s hard to think of a foreign-policy success by George Bush in that region, it was alarming that the would-be president would take his brother as his role model. Turns out it’s much worse. Jeb Bush doesn’t seem to have learned anything from his brother’s failures and he is blithely parroting the worst propaganda about the war in Iraq.
Asked on Fox News (in an interview to be aired tonight) if he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq, knowing what the world now knows, Jeb Bush replied: “I would have and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
Let’s leave aside for a moment that Mr. Bush has no clue what Mrs. Clinton would have done given her knowledge now about the lack of a security threat to the United States from weapons of mass destruction or anything else in Iraq. What he appears to be referring to is the fact that Mrs. Clinton, like most of the Senate, voted in favor of a war resolution after George W. Bush presented Congress with a National Intelligence Estimate that said Saddam Hussein had active programs in nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.
The former president likes to say Congress had the “same intelligence” he had when they voted to authorize the war, which sounds good, but is not exactly true. George Bush decided to invade Iraq long before the National Intelligence Estimate was ever even drafted. Its purpose was not to inform policymaking, but to fool Congress, the United Nations, the American people and the rest of the world into supporting the war.
The world now knows that the document was reverse-engineered to suit a policy that had already been created. The assessments of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs were wrong, and hotly disputed within the intelligence community at the time; the Bush administration just conveniently forgot to mention that to Congress.
Mr. Bush said in his interview: “Once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein we didn’t focus on security first,” a stunning understatement of the incompetent way Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld planned the invasion. Jeb Bush added that his brother “thinks those mistakes took place as well.”
That may set a new standard for passive shifting of responsibility — even worse than the classic dodge, “mistakes were made.”
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