Both assertions were not only proven false subsequent to the invasion; they were discredited within various agencies at the Pentagon and within the American intelligence community. That’s not what the president told the American public when he made his case for war. Rather, he presented a picture of near certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that those weapons could end up in al-Qaeda’s hands.
Much of the debate about pre-war intelligence centers on whether Bush lied to the public, or whether he acted on the best intelligence available at the time. Both possibilities miss the point. Clearly, there was a heated, bitter debate within the intelligence community, at the Pentagon and at the State Department, on the validity of the claims about Iraq’s WMDs.
Clearly, the best intelligence presented to the president necessarily had to reflect those debates. If it didn’t, those who presented it to him—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA chief George Tenet—did so knowing that their information was inconclusive. And Bush accepted the information without questioning its genesis, as a chief executive should. Bush may not have lied. But his executive irresponsibility was an equally grave failure of leadership.
That executive irresponsibility set a pattern in Bush’s failed execution of the occupation to come.
