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Originally posted by sgtclub
The report found that the Administration did not pressure the CIA/intelligence community to reach a desired result.
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Cite, please.
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So it has now been established that (1) the 16 words were not a lie
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If by "not a lie" you mean that it was literally correct that the British were telling us they had some source -- unknown to us -- that led them to believe the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium, that is true. If you think it was appropriate for the President to use the State of the Union to try to scare people about Iraq's nuclear program when his own intelligence people disagreed with the substance, simply on the basis of hearsay from another country, then let's just agree to disagree.
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(2) no pressure was put on intelligence,
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Bullfuckingshit. If you believe this you were on Mars two years ago.
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and (3) this was an intelligence failure, rather than a lie.
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Again with your strange bimodal world. I take it you never see dusk -- it's day, and then it's night, right?
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What are you insinuating that he did wrong (other than any disagreement you may have with policy)?
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Where do you want me to start? Should we stick to Iraq? I think it's clear, far beyond dispute, that the President and people around him decided to go to war with Iraq without regard to what the intelligence community was saying. The intel was used to sell the war. I think the President's motives were pure (but pure what?), but profoundly misguided. While others around him were hot on the idea of draining the swamp, etc., I think the President was uncomfortable with the difficulties of the containment policy and had no patience for it. I think he saw Hussein as an enemy, and 9/11 prompted him to want to act against our enemies. Having decided to go to war, he was not apt to reconsider, and so what the intelligence community then told him was irrelevant to policy formation. He convinced himself that he was doing the greater good, and that justified all sorts of other things. Like overstating the case for war.
