Oliphant: For Bush, no excuse (Great column!)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/07/13/for_bush_no_excuse?mode=PF

THE VERY BEST that can be said on President Bush's behalf is that he used the CliffsNotes version of intelligence information about Iraq as the basis for a poorly planned and rushed invasion of Iraq in March of last year.

The problem with this charitable approach to Bush is that it's unfair to CliffsNotes.

The lazy student's version of anything is at least an accurate summary.

But the intelligence information about Iraq was wrong. In terms that Bush can perhaps recall from his days at Yale as a budding intellectual of limited achievement, it's as if he went forth to his final exam on Dickens and wrote confidently that David Copperfield murdered Uriah Heep with a fireplace poker. The policy sophisticates and intelligence insiders are having a field day with the Senate Intelligence Committee's limited and highly censored report on prewar information. However, the sophisticates are missing the truly jarring truth.

In plain English, the Central Intelligence Agency was serving Bush large helpings of baloney in the form of summaries of analyses and conclusions that were directly contradicted by the detailed information on which these analyses and conclusions were supposedly based. For those seeking to blame the summaries, including Bush's own campaign and policy big shots, the desperate finger-pointing works only on the basis of an assumption that is grounds for tossing Bush out of office.