Responsiblity: Faulty Intelligence Edition

The President had yet another of his public ramblings today. This time around, he shocked the nation for the second time by uttering this bizarre-sounding phrase: "I take responsibility." This time out, for going to war:

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq, and I am also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities and we're doing just that," he said.

But he said, "My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision" because he was deemed a threat and that regardless, "We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator."

Bush's new admission was significant in that he rarely admits mistakes, although he has acknowledged failures in U.S. intelligence on Iraq before.

His administration touted Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a reason for going to war in March 2003, but such weapons were never found.

Cute. Just adorable. We were wrong, but we did the right thing.

This is, as I said, the second time Bush has approached an admission of error. The first was his half-ass attempt at taking responsiblity for various federal failures following Katrina, which came much too late, without any on-the-ground improvement, and has yet to provide an adequate plan for short-term living arrangments for the displaced or for long-term restructuring in the hurricane-hit areas.

In a way, this is more telling of the complete shift in America's international policy during the past 5 years of The Administration. Many of us have argued for this entire duration that, in effect, the intelligence and information itself was meaningless- it was merely justification for the Agenda- it was the easiest, quickest, and most effective way to sell the policy of preemptive strike- which is a revolutionary concept and one of extreme international danger. This is made more clear in the headline and text of another Yahoo! posted news item reporting the exact same event. This one, rather than being titled "Bush takes blame" has been recast to fit the ideology which is more important: "Bush defends Iraq invasion, preemptive war doctrine"

"In an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," he said in a speech aimed at shoring up flagging US support for the conflict.

The president took responsibility for launching the March 2003 invasion based on intelligence that "turned out to be wrong" about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, none of which were found.

"As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq -- and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that," he said.

The US president, who embraced preemptive war as US strategy after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, did not name any potential targets, but said the Iraq vote would put pressure on the governments of Iran and Syria.

Bush clearly can concede fault, to a degree- by "taking responsibility," or at least saying he does, as a way to maintain a resemblance of control during dark hours.

But he has basically exposed that greater question. The debate will rage eternally whether going to war on the premise of their reconstituted nuclear program was justified or not. But at no point, really, were we not going to war after September 11, 2001. We had no choice, given the circumstances of an Administration in power who finally, with their majority hold in all branches of government, could see a series of events which allow them the opportunity to push into action their great experiment: exporting democracy using 'preemptive' strikes against enemy nations. That shift, that assumption that you could just strike others before they strike you, is the biggest change in international politics.

Because now, declared or not, everybody- every state that has an enemy on any front, is both a bully and a suspect. Everybody in the world will attempt to engage in Bush-designed preemptive strikes.

So when he takes responsibility for his broken intelligence- we must remember that at no point did they think the intelligence was any good. They knew it was bad.

But it was the quickest and dirtiest way to get their bigger project in action.