I’m not sure I understand what you are saying… are you saying the new memos provide no new information?
Are you saying that you agree that yes indeed,
- GWB lied to the American people over and over again about his motives for invading Iraq
- Bush to this day continues the lie by continuing to assert that American safety was indeed the motivation
- Further that Bush lied about when he decided to start to build his case for war
- And that Bush did not adequately plan for post-war peace-making
That is what I believe all the old testimony was suggesting and what the new memos appear to confirm.
Or… are you saying the old data and the new memos combined say something completely different?
By my way of thinking… “planning how to build support for an invasion” is quite different than “investigating WMD’s or the threat to America”.
As we see very clearly, the spring 2002 planning was to build support for an invasion. That is quite a different thing than what Bush continues to assert.
Flow chart:
- Decide Iraq is a pain/risk/blemish (no controversy here)
- Ponder what to do about it (italic items done poorly)
- Diplomacy
- Plan for diplomacy
- Negotiate
- Regime change
- Plan for invasion.
- Plan to convince people invasion is needed
- Plan for post-war reconstruction
- Persuade people invasion is needed
- Invade
- Bush chose 2.2 (regime change) sometime before March 18th, 2002… ("We backed regime change")
- As part of 2.2.4, trying to convince people that the invasion is necessary and urgent
- “had to be a strategy for building support for military action”
- “need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN SCRs”
- and from the original DSM, Bush was executing the selling of the war: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
One can assail the integrity of the memos, but if the memos are genuine and accurate then the conclusion is obvious and appalling.