1 00:00:00,320 --> 00:00:04,540 I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me. 2 00:00:04,540 --> 00:00:09,740 OK, it was mostly me. I had some help from a clueless President 3 00:00:09,750 --> 00:00:16,570 George W. Bush and his neo-conservative puppet master, Vice President Dick Cheney. 4 00:00:16,570 --> 00:00:22,490 Senior White House fanatics spoon fed reporters like me cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s 5 00:00:22,490 --> 00:00:28,910 alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction so that America could invade Iraq and seize its oil. 6 00:00:28,910 --> 00:00:33,930 None of this is true, but many Americans continue to believe it. 7 00:00:33,930 --> 00:00:39,610 People died. It was a war. But President Bush didn’t lie us into it. 8 00:00:39,610 --> 00:00:47,510 The false narrative that he did is, itself, a lie and deserves to be, at last, retired. 9 00:00:47,510 --> 00:00:54,000 There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and some of the media’s prewar WMD stories 10 00:00:54,000 --> 00:01:01,340 were wrong, including some of mine. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that 11 00:01:01,340 --> 00:01:09,000 the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 12 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:14,920 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community’s 13 00:01:14,920 --> 00:01:21,800 incorrect conclusions about Saddam’s WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. 14 00:01:21,800 --> 00:01:27,280 But relying on the mistakes of others -- completely understandable mistakes given 15 00:01:27,290 --> 00:01:33,140 Saddam’s horrendous record -- and making errors of judgment are not the same as lying. 16 00:01:33,140 --> 00:01:39,100 American, European and arms-control experts, counterterrorism agents, and analysts who 17 00:01:39,110 --> 00:01:44,880 studied Iraq and briefed White House officials and journalists were the same people who gave 18 00:01:44,880 --> 00:01:50,660 me and my fellow reporters at the New York Times accurate information for years about 19 00:01:50,660 --> 00:01:58,000 Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s growing threat to America. In fact, eight months before 9/11, 20 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:04,220 the Times published a series of articles on that threat -- a series for which the Times staff, 21 00:02:04,220 --> 00:02:08,100 including me, won a Pulitzer Prize. 22 00:02:08,100 --> 00:02:13,940 The members of the intelligence community with whom I dealt were overwhelmingly reliable, 23 00:02:13,950 --> 00:02:21,690 hardworking and honest. But they were also human, and, in the aftermath of 9/11, 24 00:02:21,690 --> 00:02:27,240 they were very wary of ever again underestimating a terrorist threat. 25 00:02:27,240 --> 00:02:33,040 There’s an enduring myth that policy makers pressured intelligence analysts into altering 26 00:02:33,040 --> 00:02:40,740 their estimates to suit the Bush administration’s push to war. Yet, several thorough, bipartisan 27 00:02:40,740 --> 00:02:47,570 inquiries found no evidence of such pressure. What they reveal, instead, is that bad intelligence 28 00:02:47,570 --> 00:02:50,490 led to bad policy decisions. 29 00:02:50,490 --> 00:02:57,620 The 2005 commission headed by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb and Republican Judge Laurence 30 00:02:57,620 --> 00:03:04,080 Silberman called the intelligence community’s estimates on Iraq “dead wrong.” A year earlier, 31 00:03:04,080 --> 00:03:09,280 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence denounced such intelligence failures as the 32 00:03:09,290 --> 00:03:15,190 product of “group think,” rooted in a fear of underestimating grave threats to national 33 00:03:15,190 --> 00:03:18,130 security in the wake of 9/11. 34 00:03:18,130 --> 00:03:24,280 Will Tobey, a former deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration 35 00:03:24,290 --> 00:03:30,069 still fumes about the failure to see problems in the CIA’s intelligence that supported 36 00:03:30,069 --> 00:03:37,680 Secretary of State Colin Powell’s prewar speech at the United Nations about Iraq’s WMD. 37 00:03:37,680 --> 00:03:44,620 Based partly on the CIA’s assurances of strong evidence for each claim, Mr. Powell 38 00:03:44,630 --> 00:03:51,190 was persuaded that the case against Saddam was, in his words, “rock solid.” 39 00:03:51,190 --> 00:03:57,980 Why wouldn’t he? Over the previous 15 years, none of the congressional committees routinely 40 00:03:57,980 --> 00:04:04,700 briefed on Iraq’s WMD assessments expressed concern about bias or error. The decision 41 00:04:04,700 --> 00:04:11,250 to go to war in Iraq received broad support in Congress from both Republicans and Democrats. 42 00:04:11,250 --> 00:04:17,930 And, again for good reason. Even if the intelligence community overestimated Saddam Hussein’s 43 00:04:17,930 --> 00:04:24,370 WMD capability, it didn’t create it out of thin air. Saddam had used chemical weapons 44 00:04:24,370 --> 00:04:30,320 on his own people, killing thousands. He had invaded his neighbors, repeatedly. 45 00:04:30,320 --> 00:04:36,140 No, President Bush did not take America into a war because he was strong armed by a 46 00:04:36,140 --> 00:04:43,400 neoconservative cabal. As President Bush himself famously asserted, he was the “decider.” 47 00:04:43,400 --> 00:04:49,500 And no, he didn’t go to war for oil. If we wanted Saddam’s oil, we could have bought it. 48 00:04:49,500 --> 00:04:54,500 President’s Bush decision to go to war was based on the information that he and his team 49 00:04:54,500 --> 00:05:00,130 relied on -- information that was collected by the world’s top agents and analyzed by 50 00:05:00,130 --> 00:05:05,590 the world’s top analysts, including the intelligence agencies of France, Germany 51 00:05:05,590 --> 00:05:11,980 and Russia, countries whose leaders did not support going to war. But they all agreed on one thing 52 00:05:11,980 --> 00:05:16,640 -- Saddam had and was continuing to develop WMD. 53 00:05:16,650 --> 00:05:21,900 Our intelligence professionals, and those of major European countries, overestimated 54 00:05:21,900 --> 00:05:27,120 Saddam’s capabilities. Mistakes like that filter through the system -- from the White 55 00:05:27,120 --> 00:05:32,520 House to Congress to journalists to the public. And those mistakes impact policy. 56 00:05:32,520 --> 00:05:39,320 But here’s the key thing to remember -- they were mistakes…not lies. 57 00:05:39,320 --> 00:05:45,080 I’m Judith Miller contributing editor of City Journal, for Prager University.