Over the last few days I have read quite a few articles arguing that the Bush administration lied us into the Iraq war. Yes, the authors allow, President Bush and other officials had mistaken intelligence reports. But they also exaggerated the evidence they had been given, ignored contrary evidence, and made claims (about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, for example) that did not have the support of the intelligence services.
I don’t doubt that administration officials and their allies sometimes, maybe even often, overstated the extent to which the available evidence backed up the case for military action, and it’s worth noting it. But it’s also worth noting two other things. The first is that as far as I can tell, none of this exaggeration amounted to dishonesty. The people making the exaggerated or one-sided claims appear to have believed that they were telling the truth. Supporters of the war may have made culpable intellectual errors in evaluating and discussing the evidence, but they were not saying things they knew to be false. Hillary Clinton, for example, said on the day she voted to authorize force that Ba’athist Iraq had given “aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida.” I have no reason to doubt she thought that.
The second is that it’s not clear that spin is what convinced the country—policymakers and public alike—to go to war. There were many different arguments made for war. But the main reason the U.S. went to war is that almost everyone thought that the Iraqi WMD threat was real, and most people who thought that also thought that it called for military action. That’s the basic case that almost everyone who supported the war made, including those liberal hawks who later repented their support and insisted that the Bush administration had lied the country into war.