re: #1113 elbruce

So the President of the United States of America got his bad information from individual Senators and Congressional Representatives rather than from his own intelligence agencies? Really?

If so, then he’s so criminally incompetent that I’d rather he were a liar.

Bush wasn’t lying. Just mistaken. The CIA knew what Bush wanted to hear, and they wanted to make him happy. So they accepted reports from agents they should have realized were making shit up, and dressed them up as fact, and everybody bit.

Circular self-delusion situation. It’s happened before. Most wars are the result of amazingly stupid miscalculations. Almost always on at least one side. For the Iraq war, on two sides. Saddam ought to have known that he had to back down or end up swinging from a rope.

And Bush ought to have known that his own CIA was too eager to please.