Thursday, November 03, 2005

Why Did We Go to War In Iraq?

Given George Packer's rather bizarre gyrations about Iraq it's interesting that he understands that it is still the unanswered question.

Also, this is something which has gone mostly gone unnoticed. DiFi's off the bus:

Dianne Feinstein, a member of the intelligence committee, said yesterday: "Had I known then what I know now, I never would have have cast that vote, not in a thousand years."



And, Paul Begala dealt with the ridiculous other talking point coming from the conservative Borg - that the Senate "had the same intelligence" as the White House.

BEGALA: First off, the White House is who provides the intelligence to the Congress and the notion that the Congress sees the same intelligence as the president is nonsense.

I used to work in the White House and I used to work on the Congress. I can tell you, presidents and this president especially, treats Congress like a mushroom factory, keeps them in the dark and feeds them manure.

First of all, they didn't as Begala points out. And, secondly, the vote was an authorization to use force which got the inspectors in who then determined that there were probably no WMD there before Bush told them to get out before the bombs started dropping. Of course you had to be a fool to not have known that the force authorization meant that war was inevitable, and many members of Congress were foolish for that reason, but that doesn't mean the actual final decision to go to war was theirs.