Because only the victors get to (re)write history, no?
This really isn’t complicated. President Bush was not being “blunt” or showing “candor” when he told ABC News in an interview published yesterday that his biggest regret was the failure of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Rather, he was whitewashing away his own role in the fisaco by promoting the demonstrable falsehood that there was no available evidence or information that argued against war and that he was merely fooled into invading Iraq solely by the bad intel.
The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel — ignored by the Bush administration — saying that Saddam wasn’t the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing — something that also went ignored.
These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush’s efforts to falsify history in yesterday’s interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.
Or maybe losers get to write history, too.