Is it spin or self-delusion?

In an interview with George W. Bush, ABC News' Charlie Gibson asked if he had a "do-over," what would it be. Bush replied:

The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. 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. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Whoa, there. Time for a reality check: much of the intelligence was indeed iffy, yet Bush acted as if it had been as solid as Dick Cheney's arrogance. Bush, Cheney and others claimed that Saddam Hussein had obtained aluminum tubes that could only be used for enriching uranium for bombs--when the intelligence community was split on this point (with the true nuclear experts maintaining the tubes could not be used for such a purpose). At one point prior to the war, Bush said that it wasn't known whether Saddam yet had obtained a nuclear weapons--suggesting that the Iraqi dictator might have already gone nuclear. But every intelligence report noted Iraq was years away from producing a nuclear bomb. In the run-up to the war, Bush hyped less-than-definitive intelligence--insisting it was indeed definitive--and exaggerated the case for war. (Don't believe me? Go read Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.)

Gibson followed up:

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is a big deal--but it ought to be difficult for Obama-backers to raise a full-throated cheer for it. Obama's chief selling point at the start of the campaign was that he had been right on the Iraq war. Powell, of course, was not only wrong; he had lent his prestige to the invasion, fronting for the Bush White House on the phony WMD case. And while some may view Powell's Obama endorsement as a stab at rehabilitation, Powell has never fully come to public terms with his role in the Iraq WMD scandal.

On Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw gently approached the matter:

BROKAW: I want to ask you about your own role in the decision to go to war in Iraq. Barack Obama has been critical of your appearance before the United Nations at that time. Bob Woodward has a new book out called "The War Within," and here's what he had to say about Colin Powell and his place in the administration: "Powell didn't think Iraq was a necessary war, and yet he had gone along in a hundred ways, large and small. He had resisted at times but had succumbed to the momentum and his own sense of deference -- even obedience -- to the president. Perhaps more than anyone else in the administration, Powell had been the `closer' for the president's case on war." ...What's the lesson in all of that for a former -- for a new secretary of state or for a new national security adviser, based on your own experience?

POWELL: Well, let's start at the beginning. I said to the president in 2002, we should try to solve this diplomatically and avoid war. The president accepted that recommendation. We took it to the U.N. But the president, by the end of 2002, believed that the U.N. was not going to solve the problem, and he made a decision that we had to prepare for military action.I fully supported that. And I have never said anything to suggest I did not support going to war. I thought the evidence was there. And it is not just my closing of the whole deal with my U.N. speech. I know the importance of that speech, and I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong. But three months before my speech, with a heavy majority, the United States Congress expressed its support to use military force if it was necessary. And so, we went in and used military force.

My unhappiness was that we didn't do it right. It was easy to get to Baghdad, but then we forgot that there was a lot more that had to be done. And we didn't have enough force to impose our will in the country or to deal with the insurgency when it broke out, and that I regret....

BROKAW: Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation, because we now know that they did not exist, was it then a war of necessity or just a war of choice?

POWELL: Without the weapons of mass destruction present, as conveyed to us by the intelligence community in the most powerful way, I don't think there would have been a war. It was the reason we took it to the public. It was the reason we took it to the American people, to the Congress, who supported it on that basis, and it's the presentation I made to the United Nations. Without those weapons of mass destruction then, Iraq did not present to the world the kind of threat that it did if it had weapons of mass destruction.

That last sentence is a syllogism. Of course, without WMDs, Iraq was not the threat it would have been had it possessed WMDs. The point was that it did not possess WMDs. And as Michael Isikoff and I showed in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the Bush administration purposefully exaggerated the error-ridden WMD case that was in itself based on faulty and incomplete evidence. But Powell dumps all the blame here on the intel gang for screwing up the intelligence. That's too convenient a dodge. Here's a case in point: the Bush White House claimed that aluminum tubes obtained by Saddam Hussein could only be used for nuclear centrifuges. Yet the nuclear scientists within the intelligence community with the most expertise on the subject disputed this. That did not stop Dick Cheney and Condi Rice from making claims on this matter that were utterly false--claims that analysts at Powell's Department of State would have known were false.