Liberal Talk Radio

Vice President Cheney’s still out there today arguing that it’s “dishonest and reprehensible” to say that the administration misled the country in the run-up to the Iraq war:

“What is not legitimate, and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible, is the suggestion by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence,” Cheney said.

How does one define “misled?” That seems to be the Clintonesque parsing that one must apply to Cheney’s statement.

Morton Halperin at Democracy Arsenal parses it thusly:

Bush, Cheney and Rumseld were aware that the evidence for Iraq having WMD was soft and circumstantial. That was never made clear; in fact, the opposite was asserted. The Administration, in both its public statements and Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council, gave many examples of concrete evidence, which all turned out to be false. There were many voices in the Intelligence Community warning about these allegations, but the Administration not only chose to believe the stories, it also exaggerated the certainty of the evidence. The Bush Administration also painted a threat of Iraq getting nuclear weapons, which was far more alarmist than the intelligence suggested.

That’s right on. The decision to invade Iraq was never about WMD. WMD was just the one thing everyone could agree on, as Paul Wolfowitz has famously noted. It was a sales tool. They knew in their gut that he had WMD, they just needed to find the right evidence to make the sale.

Our leaders are inundated with intelligence. They must parse, they must weigh, and they must choose which is worth acting on and which isn’t. it’s not an easy task, and you don’t get to be wrong. It’s clear a good deal of parsing went into the intelligence on Iraqi WMD. The real question is, what was the criteria for the parsing? You’d think the number one criterion would be, “is this good intelligence?” But in Cheney’s office, the number one criterion was instead, “does this support my case for Iraq?”

Is that actually “misleading,” or just crafty salesmanship?