We weren't all wrong

I've been wanting to blog about this for a while. The whole talking point "We were all wrong about WMD in Iraq" is patently untrue. I wasn't wrong. I didn't believe Colin Powell, as I wrote about last May.

I just couldn't figure out how best to express this. The Slacktivist has managed it. It's good, and explains why reasonable people were deceived by the media and deceived by the White House. Maybe it was my distrust of this administration, but I knew back then they were lying about the economy and tax cuts, so I wasn't all that surprised that they were lying about WMDs in Iraq.

slacktivist: "Not Everyone Was Wrong"

"We were all wrong," David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector told Congress on Jan. 29.

Kay's statement sent the Bush administration scurrying for a response. That response, as it turns out, has been to try to minimize that last word -- "wrong" -- by emphasizing the first three, "we were all."

This has become the official administration "talking point" on the question of Iraq's nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction. Literally.

[snip]

The purpose of these "talking points" is to argue that everyone was wrong. That the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Iraq's WMD threat was universal.

The problem with this assertion is that no such consensus existed. The "intelligence community" has been questioning the Bush administration's claims for two years to any reporter willing to take notes. Members of Congress are furious that they were denied access to information and fed misinformation during the months leading up to the invasion. And Bush ultimately broke his promise to guarantee a vote of the U.N. Security Council because he realized that body was wholly unconvinced by his argument.