Brooks’ mistake

“History is an infinitely complex web of causations. To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now.” These are very profound observations from the beginning of the essay by David Brooks in The Bee on May 21, but when Brooks starts talking about the “fable ... that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war,” he strays from the facts.

The 2005 Robb-Silberman Report does not counter any argument of political duplicity from the Bush Administration, since the commission’s mandate forced them to ignore what was done with the intelligence. Silberman wrote in the report at the time, “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

Given the administration’s disdain for Joseph Wilson’s intelligence gathered in Niger before the invasion, and his subsequent punishment by Dick Cheney’s office outing his wife as a CIA agent, I think it reasonable to believe that the vice president, at least, withheld information from Congress and the American people that might have prevented us from going to war again in Iraq.

This story was originally published May 24, 2015 at 8:25 AM with the headline "Brooks’ mistake."