"The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," Bush told ABC in December 2008.
Bush’s only regret about the invasion is that his cover story unraveled so completely.
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It amuses me that these gop/bags are putting the Iraq war fiasco front and center of their campaigns!
All these years later. After the biggest cluster F of lying us into war, they still just can’t say that they were wrong!!
Makes me smile.
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And, NEVER will be!
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The biggest failure of the w presidency is not the intelligence failure…he knew it was all made up by dick and company.
It was being found out! That’s his biggest regret!
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I’d argue that by far the biggest mistake was ignoring the Chief of the Army’s assessment that it would take several hundred thousand soldiers to occupy and secure the country properly, in favor of Dick Rummy and the Neocons’ plan to shock, awe and be welcomed as liberators. They caused a complete breakdown of law and order, in which Iraqis looted the whole country top to bottom, destroying records and stealing everything not bolted down. Marauders kicked people out of their homes, while looters and vandals destroyed the property records that might have helped people prove the homes were theirs. Villagers even stole the “yellowcake” barrels from the God damned nuclear research facility, and used them to hold water!
It’s impossible to know whether soldiers found no WMD because they were never there, or because President Bush’s badly botched battle plan let people hide, move or steal them.
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Those Republican numbnuts weren’t voting for or against the efficacy of the Iraq War. They had thoroughly put that issue on the back burner. Even in the last Presidential election, they refused to mention Bush’s name, let alone invite him to any of their confabs. And the midterms weren’t anywhere about that war as an issue…so I understand that Republicans voted for more of these bozos, but I hardly think it had anything to do with that fucking war. Most of these newly minted teabaggers weren’t even in office prior to getting to Congress. With Jebya in the race, they don’t have that luxury however. It’ll come up whether they like it or not. Its kind of a Bush thing he can’t avoid…and the rest of his party will also have to confront the elephant in the room because of it.
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You could plug in “U.S. military personnel” where you’ve used “Iraqis” and subsequent investigations would render your edited statement true.
This search was one more ignominious moment in a presidency covered in ignominy.
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…Just wait 'til Jeb sees you, dubya…
Talk about regret.!
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The hundreds of UNSCOM weapons inspectors back on the ground in Iraq, at the invitation of Sadaam, since October of 2002 proved all the intelligence Bush’s handlers were stovepiping to his office false. Especially the nuclear weapons program Condi “mushroom clouds” Rice was pedaling. There was nothing there and the inspectors using every scrap of intell from international allies hinting where stockpiles or manufacturing programs were located were inspected and disproven. To paraphrase what Rand Paul’s response was, “Of course I would have voted against the invasion of Iraq knowing what we know now because we knew back then that the intell being used was worthless”. It was not a failure of Intelligence, it was a failure of policy. And remember that Bush bestowed upon the director of the CIA who oversaw that “intell failure” George Tenet the nations highest medal. Heckuva a job there Georgie.
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You know I was reading a piece yesterday by David Corn about Wolfowtiz and his fetish for these conspiracies that Iraq was behind 9/11 and other nonsense. The irony that Wolfowitz, a hard line Israeli sympathizer, was feed every bit of his conspiracy by people working for Iran is just soo incredibly deep.
One thing that most people don’t like to discuss is that while the invasion of Iraq was a huge intelligence failure for the US, it was a huge win for Iran. So many, if not most, of the people spinning stories to the administration had direct links to Iran. From Curveball to the meeting in Prague that never happened, Iran had their fingerprints all over the wrong assertions being eaten up by Wolfowitz and his ilk. And as a result, they had their major competitor in the region removed from the board, without having to fire a shot of their own.
But Wolfowitz and his ilk were so wedded to their PNAC delusions, that they eagerly lapped it up, completely ignoring the inconvenient truth of where it was coming from…the country they despise even more for threatening Israel.
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As J. Marshall just posted…not only was it a mistake, but more importantly, it boils down to the fact that these Bushies all fucking lied to the American people. And there’s no getting around that. As much as people don’t want to believe that our elected officials, particularly in the highest echelons of our government, as Josh Marshall says, would willfully deceive us…that’s precisely what they did. They fucking LIED to the American people so they could have their fucking WAR. As he states…it was all “quite simply a crock” of shit. So taken truthfully for what it was…it was far more than a Oopsy-daisy ‘we made a mistake’. It was intentional duplicity, and the kind of double-dealing to get exactly the war that they wanted even before 9/11 happened. That just turned out to be the predicate for which they based all their fucking lies once they could ruthlessly conflate the two.
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NeoCon Zionists like Paul Wolfowitz and the original core of the PNAC crowd are rabid ideologues, initially sparked by their desire not to safeguard the US, but their dreams of a secure an ever-expanding Israel. Wolfowitz is among those most immune to fact, and has proven to be an utterly failed and dangerous character. I can’t believe he hasn’t been tarred and feathered, or worse.
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Is our Bushs learning? No and Rubio is just as stupid.
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Bush II has, on many occasions, stated that he didn’t make a single mistake during his time in office and that he didn’t have a single thing that he wishes he’d done differently. Those statements alone show how terrible unqualified he was to hold the office. Not a single man who has been President hasn’t made “mistakes”…although a lot of them didn’t involve creating huge public debt and killing folks…and any remotely honest President would admit that. It pretty much goes with the job. In fact, it goes with the job of simply being human, something that is in doubt for Cheney, the real president during much of that time.
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So, when Jeb answered that question, saying he would still do it and that there was no daylight between him and his brother, he was just answering truthfully. The rest of the week was just to cover his shock that everyone else thought Iraq was the worst foreign policy mistake of the last half-century.
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Thank you for this article – I was wondering where Rubio got the impression that Bush wouldn’t have invaded Iraq if he had it to do over again, because that was certainly not the take I had after hearing him speak at the Richmond Forum in 2013. He was quite vehement that faulty intelligence or not, invading Iraq was absolutely the right thing to do. And whatever he says now, I think Brother Jeb thinks exactly the same way.
Did anyone really believe that the men sawing off the heads of innocent captives or blowing themselves up in markets would have been peaceful citizens if only we had left Saddam Hussein alone?
Nobody ever said they were. The point was that Saddam Hussein was able to hold them in check. No question that he was a ruthless dictator, and that his opponents suffered terribly under his rule, but there was at least some degree of order under his regime, oppressive though it may have been. I’m not sure I can see that life is any better for ordinary Iraqis with him gone, either Sunni or Shiia. It is more chaotic, it is more lacking in basic infrastructure, and it is a good deal more dangerous.
No more of these guys in the White House, please.
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“I don’t think Congress would’ve voted in favor of authorization if they knew that.”
Many in Congress, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle voted for the AUMF specifically on the premise that it was the needed threat to get IAEA inspectors back into Iraq, which it did.
That should have ended the rational for the need to invade since the IAEA were on the ground, with unfettered access and were not finding the claimed WMD evidence (since said WMDs didn’t exist). But Bush invaded anyway and the inspectors only pulled out because of the launch of the invasion.
Why do fuckers like Rubio insist on trying to re-write history?
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And they are still falling for it. And not just Joe SixPack, either – the Serious People are singing the same tune. Of course, the Serious People may know very well it’s economic voodoo, so they haven’t really fallen for it, they just push it because it’s voodoo that is beneficial to them.
It’s not Obama’s fault that GITMO has not been shut down – there’s not a lot he can do when Congress refuses to vote any funds for it.
Iraq and Afghanistan are like the mess in “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back” – efforts to clean those messes up just seem to make more mess. And I think the Middle East mess is beyond the power of the Cat in the Hat’s special VROOM to clean it up.
I don’t think Obama was trying to bamboozle people with what he promised to do as a candidate; I firmly believe that he wanted to do everything that he was proposing. But he ran into a Republican opposition determined to block him at every turn, and while I am not happy that the phone and e-mail surveillance programs continue to operate, I don’t recall Obama every specifically promising to shut them down. I do, however, remember him voting in the Senate for immunity from lawsuits for telecoms who violated their customers’ privacy rights to turn over information to the government. So it shouldn’t have come as any great surprise to anyone that he has allowed those surveillance programs to continue.
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And you know, it wasn’t just that they lied – it was that it was such a transparent lie. I could see very well that what they were feeding the public was pure bullshit, and I know virtually all of the regulars here could see it, too. And yet, I know some very intelligent people, people who were in a position to know better, who swallowed that BS whole. And I have yet to figure out how that could have happened, except that these were all moderate conservatives from the Vietnam era convinced that the domestic peace movement was to blame for losing that war, and I guess their distrust of people who dared to question the government over matters of security was great enough to blind them to obvious falsity of what the government was feeding them.
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