The Washington Post Tries To Rewrite History . . . Again Posted by Michael Cohen

Here's a question for DA readers: if you were to pick the most extreme over-reaction from September 11th what might it be? Guantanamo Bay? Torture? Warrantless wiretapping? Sure those all would be on the list, but I have a feeling the number one pick for most observers of American foreign policy over the past ten years would have to be the decision to invade Iraq - a war of choice against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 was not harboring al Qaeda and was not a direct threat to the United States. It was, of course, a conflict that did absolutely nothing to further US national security interests or substantially weaken al Qaeda.

Yet in an ongoing efforts to wash its hands of responsibility for cheerleading this singularly calamitous event in American history, the Washington Post editorial page seems to think that the disaster of Iraq barely rates a mention.  In an editorial arguing that the United States did not overreact to 9/11 - a unique position to say the least - it mentions Iraq only 4 times (twice in passing).

It has only this to say about the war:

"The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence and was arrogantly ill-prepared for the responsibilities of occupation once Saddam Hussein fell."

Now do you see what Fred Hiatt and his fellow op-ed writers have done here? According to their interpretation of history the fault for the decision to go to war in Iraq lies not with public officials and their enablers in the mass media; or the pressure that the White House put on intelligence agencies to support pre-determined conclusions about the threat from Iraq - but rather with the intelligence itself. 

In fact, as the 2008 Senate report looking at pre-war intelligence on Iraq demonstrated, Bush Administration officials made comments about the threat from Iraq not backed up intel estimates:

Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

Indeed, Fred Hiatt has been trotting out this malarkey about "faulty intelligence" off and on for several years ago (I wrote about it here in 2008). It wasn't true then; it's not true now. 

Instead of acknowledging how alarmism about jihadist terror bred a desperate and ill-advised over-reaction that caused the US to squander precious resources on a misguided conflict - for which the Washington Post was more than happy to lustily support - the editors at the Post would rather focus on the positive:

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride. 

Again, nothing that the United States did in Iraq made one American safer - rather it took the lives of more than 4700 Americans, wounded tens of thousands of others and killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis. Along with the 10 year engagement in Afghanistan it diverted trillions of dollars in resources away from pressing national challenges (Think Progress has a nice rundown of how that money could have been more effectively spent)

There are a lot of words to describe this series of events.

Pride is most certainly not one of them.

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