http://www.alternet.org/election08/111104/bush_tries_to_white-wash_history%3B_portrays_himself_as_a_victimBush Tries to White-Wash History; Portrays Himself as a VictimBy Matthew Yglesias, The American Prospect. Posted December 17, 2008.
Even after all this time, Bush views the Iraq War with regret not over anything he did, but rather, over something that was done to him.
It's tiresome to need to point this out at this late date but, yes, George W. Bush and his administration misled the country while making the case for war with Iraq and, remarkably, are still trying to mislead people about it. In a Dec. 1 interview with ABC News' Charlie Gibson, Bush said that "the biggest regret" of his presidency was "the intelligence failure in Iraq."
In other words, his biggest regret wasn't regret over anything he did but rather regret over something that was done to him, a vague "intelligence failure" rather than a misguided decision to invade another country. Bush explained that "a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence."
This is, even by Bush standards, a pretty breathtaking revision of history. In fact, very few members of Congress looked at the intelligence -- Thomas Ricks reports in his book Fiasco that just five read the classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capabilities. But had more members taken the time, they would have found what Spencer Ackerman and John Judis reported back in June of 2003 -- that the Bush administration removed a number of caveats and contrary pieces of evidence from the classified version of the estimate when producing a shorter, unclassified version for public consumption. More curious investigators might have been further interested in the fact, reported in the same piece, that even the more accurate classified version represented a dramatic change in the intelligence community's assessment of the Iraq situation. As Judis and Ackerman observe, when George Tenet offered his January 2002 review of nuclear proliferation issues "he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq."
The main thing that changed over the course of 2002 wasn't anything about the intelligence, it was the fact that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq. Consequently, a new, more alarmist intelligence estimate was written up. Then a more alarmist redacted version was released to the public. And the administration's public statements were more alarming still. There were real intelligence failures here, but they were and are dwarfed by the policy failure. This failure was driven by administration hawks such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith who appear to have embraced the deluded conspiracy theories of American Enterprise Institute adjunct fellow Laurie Mylroie (who thanks Wolfowitz in the introduction to her conspiracy-mongering book) and Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes (who followed up his entry into the genre with an authorized biography of Dick Cheney) who placed Saddam Hussein at the center of anti-American terrorism around the globe.
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