No Iraq lessons

New York Times columnist David Brooks belittles the claim that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney lied us into war by pointing to the Robb-Silberman report from 2005.

But anyone conversant with that report knows it didn’t investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence. For Mr. Brooks to pretend that report “gibed with the facts” exposes him as little more than a partisan hack pushing the current revisionist spin hot off the Republican campaign trail.

In contrast, the Senate Intelligence Committee reports from 2004 and 2007 concluded, “the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.” As Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, said at the time, “There is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.” That’s an understatement in my view.

Mr. Brooks would do well to apply his cautions to the various demands made by the whole bomb Iran crowd, whose eagerness to “force revolutionary transformational change” on that country shows they haven’t learned anything at all useful from the decade long debacle of Iraq.

This story was originally published May 22, 2015 at 6:28 PM with the headline "No Iraq lessons."