All lied to Bush about the actual beliefs of the “intelligence community”. The idiots around Bush were the major problem. Maybe these turds only were telling Bush what he wanted to hear, but no one can deny they were pushing their own war mongering agenda.
Robert Dreyfuss:
I think the most important thing is that while the CIA probably did not get very much right about Iraq, they were at least convinced, most of the intelligence agencies, that there was a lot of doubt, that there were a lot of things they didn’t know. The doubts got completely erased in the policymaking circles, and in particular the Pentagon—which set up its own little sort of rump intelligence unit called the Office of Special Plans, under Douglas Feith at the Pentagon bureaucracy—not only was responsible for deleting these doubts, but they had some value added, too.
They added in their own spin and their own intelligence, part of which came from Iraqi exiles, part of which came from their own staff, which was doing its own intelligence. And they created talking papers that ended up wildly exaggerating the threat that Iraq allegedly posed to both the United States and to its neighbors, and that information went directly to Vice President Cheney’s office and to the White House, and it led the administration in the direction of going to war, because that was a war they already wanted.
In other words, the idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.
And so for Bush to argue, or anyone else to argue, that the administration went to war based on faulty intelligence is just plain silly. They would have gone to war in any case, but they were afraid to make the argument that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy and therefore, for reasons of national strategy, for reasons of oil, for reasons of Middle East policy and protecting Israel, for all of these reasons, we’re going to invade Iraq. That probably wouldn’t have sold, either to the American public or to Congress, so instead they picked on this “Iraq is a threat” argument.