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: