Lately President Bush has been going around ‘defending’ the war in Iraq. Really he is just trying to damn the democrats with him by pointing out they supported the war as well. Before the last election I never would have believed crap like this could take in the voters but since this is pretty similar to the strategy Bush successfully used against Kerry. If the voters are unable to understand that someone might believe the president should be given the authority to go to war but shouldn’t have gone to war they might not be able to figure this one out. While I usually avoid weighing in on these sort of topics since a billion liberal bloggers have usually made all the arguments for me I figure this situation is a bit different. After all alot of the far left essentially agrees with the president and thinks everyone who voted for the war is equally culpable.

So Bush is pointing out that both the Clinton administration as well as congress thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction after reviewing the same intelligence as he did. While I guess this must sound compelling to some people it ignores two critical points. First of all one has a responsibility to be much more certain of an issue before you go to war then before you offer an opinion on it. As a private citizen I might reasonably say, “Yah I think Saddam probably has WMDs,” with little or no evidence at all. Clinton, speaking as the POTUS has a responsibility to do some research and make sure he isn’t just spouting BS if he wants to say the same thing. Bush, on the other hand, is supposedly going to war on this fact so he has a responsibility to be pretty damn sure it is true. This isn’t hard to understand, juries apply this sort of reasoning all the time when they don’t apply the death penalty because they have a few lingering but not ‘reasonable’ doubts, so I hope the population isn’t taken in by it.

This brings us to the second important point. Congress simply didn’t have the same information that Bush did. In particular it didn’t know that the Bush administration had strongly encouraged intelligence favoring this outcome. They didn’t know that there were credible doubts about many of the pieces of evidence . Whether or not Bush personally heard this doesn’t matter, he is responsible if he creates a atmosphere that ensures he only hears what he wants to hear. Moreover, congress, like president Clinton, simply has a lower level of responsibility. A president who is about to make war has an active on some piece of information has a responsibility to actively interrogate his intelligence staff to see if the evidence holds up and to otherwise double check the soundness of a case. The congress can’t do this and can only trust that the president already did this and would have provided contrary evidence if he had found it.

Ultimately though it is not the prosecution of a war in Iraq that Bush needs to answer for. At least at the time there was a reasonable case to be made that this war would make Iraqis better off and would make the world a better place and who knows it still might. This, after all, is the only justification a war can ever have. What Bush deserves to answer for is not simply making this case and instead presenting intelligence whose flaws he should have been aware of. Indeed these flaws are coming around to bite us in the ass with Iran. Whatever he may have believed Clinton didn’t manage to make the entire world suspicious of our intelligence claims and I doubt this difference is just a coincidence.