David Brooks Tries To Rewrite History Of The Iraq War

[Panich52]

ThinkProgress

Twelve years ago, as an editor of the Weekly Standard, David Brooks was a staunch advocate for invading Iraq. He belittled and sneered at those who expressed doubt. On March 23, 2003, Brooks wrote: “The situation has clarified, and history will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam and which were not.”
Now, Brooks has a different view. “History is an infinitely complex web of causations,” Brooks wrote on the Iraq war in his Tuesday New York Times column.
Brooks returned to the subject of Iraq to dismiss a question posed to various Republican presidential candidates: “Was the Iraq War a mistake?” Brooks argues that everyone, including President Bush, was simply misled by faulty intelligence.
He dismisses the idea that Bush bears any responsibility, writing, “There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.”
As evidence, Brooks cites the Robb-Silberman report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Brooks neglects to mention that the Robb-Silberman report examined only the intelligence and did not investigate whether the intelligence was manipulated by Bush, Cheney and other members of the administration. “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers,” Judge Lawrence Silberman said upon released of the report.
The Senate Intelligence Committee also did a follow-up report, which you can read about in The New York Times. The report itself, signed by Republicans and Democrats, concluded that “the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

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When will RWers learn that revisionism is a failure at altering readily available, and prolific historical fact?

[tech3149]

1. Weren't we once referred to as " The United States of Amnesia"?

I think that's as true today as ever. We aren't taught true history but some self-serving feel good fantasy. And we are only too willing to accept it because we, in the collective sense, don't want to deal with the long history of crimes we have committed.

[Motown_Johnny]

9. If we were, I have forgotten about it. n/t

[hifiguy]

2. A "fable"???

If you stacked all the evidence that the evidence was cooked into a pile it would be as high as the fucking Matterhorn.

"Intelligence is being fixed around the policy."

Brooks is a blithering idiot.

[Martin Eden]

5. "Brooks is a blithering idiot"

Brooks may or may not be an idiot, but people who believe what he says most definitely are idiots.

[hifiguy]

6. That much is a lead-pipe lock.

Anyone who believes Brooks about anything needs to send their head into the shop because it needs work.

[Martin Eden]

10. Which begs the question ...

... why does the NY Times publish this propagandist?

[hifiguy]

11. "Balance" nt

[Martin Eden]

12. Not to be confused with "Responsible Journalism"

In the (approximate) words Paul Krugman during the 2000 POTUS election:

If Bush asserted the world was flat, the next day's headline would read:
Shape of Earth; Views Differ

[Octafish]

3. As evidence, Brooks cites the Robb-Silberman report of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Laurence Silberman wrote anyone who thinks Bush lied is a like a NAZI.

The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied’

Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact. This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country.

By LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN
Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking....

SNIP…

The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact—with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been “stabbed in the back” by politicians.

Sometime in the future, perhaps long after most of us are gone, an American president may need to rely publicly on intelligence reports to support military action. It would be tragic if, at such a critical moment, the president’s credibility were undermined by memories of a false charge peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier.

Mr. Silberman, a senior federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-h-silberman-the-dangerous-lie-that-bush-lied-1423437950

It's like marching orders or something.

[kentuck]

4. "Brooks argues that everyone, including President Bush, was simply misled by faulty intelligence. "

My question to Mr Brooks: Did they fix this "faulty intelligence"? And when did they fix it? And if they have not fixed the faulty intelligence, does that mean that the intelligence is still faulty?

[F4lconF16]

7. It's not failure at all.

When will RWers learn that revisionism is a failure at altering readily available, and prolific historical fact?

It's not failing--it's working better than they could have imagined. People are incredibly ignorant of history. Hell, this site is a fantastic example of historical revisionism.

[reddread]

8. they need to beat this horse's corpse soundly and right away

so when the campaigns are under way its old news and Jeb and others who actually voted for IWR can move on and focus on real issues.

[markpkessinger]

13. Brooks hides his shilling for neocons . . .

. . . behind a veneer of civility and less bellicose-sounding rhetoric. But he is and always has been a shill nonetheless.

[Skittles]

14. after all that has happened, these lying bastards are still pimping for that war