The Buck Stops Nowhere

News flash: Senator Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence thinks Congress ought to "stop and think a moment before we would ever vote for war or to go and take military action."

Yes, indeedy. One would like to think that the Senator had not newly come to such a realization, but I guess late is better than never.

The sad reality, though, is that in matters like this, Congress is at the mercy of the Executive. There is simply no way that 535 congressmen can do independent evaluations of inevitably ambiguous intelligence, especially not within the time frames that are relevant in cases where the issue is whether to go to war. In the end, they, like the public has to trust that the Administration has made the right judgments. And, in the end, it is the President that must take responsibility for being wrong.

Bush is not doing that now any more than he did with regard to the Katrina debacle. Rather than accept responsibility, he is seeking to blame Congress. And, as Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus point out, he is again spinning the facts to do that.

As Senator Robertson effectively admitted, Congress could have done more. But that does not change the fact that Bush was the President who took us to war based on intelligence that was just plain wrong. By constantly seeking to blame someone else, he makes an already bad situation that much worse.