Matt Yglesias makes some good points in this post on TAPPED. Did the CIA make mistakes? Absolutely. But in the grand scheme of things relating to the war in Iraq, how much are they to blame? It still strikes me having read thousands and thousands of pages on this admininstration that given the opportunity Bush team would have invaded Iraq if the CIA had told them it was nothing more than a land of sunshine, lollipops, and friendly spaniels. So let's fix the the problems in the intelligence community. But let's also remember that this administration had decided its course long before the infamous 2002 NIE.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum makes the same general point about the president's responsibility here. In particular, he notes the fact that the UN had been on the ground for months before our invasion in March of 2003 (yes, just b/c administration officials have repeatedly lied and said Saddam Hussein didn't let the inspectors back in, well, the fact is he did) and they hadn't found any evidence of WMD. Posted by armand at July 13, 2004 12:05 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics