Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
There's no serious dispute that Bush said things that weren't true. In absolving Bush of any bad intent, it's not clear to me what club thinks Bush was thinking.
I don't think Bush believed that he was misleading people. I think he decided upon his Iraq policy, for reasons that he thought were good, and then said what he had to in order to get popular support for it -- ignoring inconsistent facts and pushing whatever evidence there was as far or farther than it supported. Bush lied in the sense that he showed a reckless disregard for the truth.
And we can stop pretending that Bush simply repeated bad intelligence. First, we know that he was leaning on the intel agencies to tell him what he wanted to hear. Second, we know that he said things that went beyond what the intel was supporting.
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I would agree with most of this except for the fact that I believe that Bush believed that there were WMDs. Why else would Saddam have been playing those games? As good as our intel is it could not tell him for sure one way or another - and the way Saddam Hussein was acting any reasonble person would have concluded he had WMDs.
