Iraq Intelligence Blame Game

A propos of this, former Rep. Martin Frost (D TX) has it exactly right when he says, on Fox news no less, that:

When a president of the United States makes truly outrageous statements, he deserves to be called on them. That’s exactly what happened last Friday when President Bush spoke on Veterans Day.

He is talking, of course, about Bush's Veterans' Day speech claiming that Congress in general, and the Democrats in particular, were equally culpable for the decision to invade Iraq. Frost's rejoinder:

We now know that the intelligence relied upon by the Bush administration to take us to war was faulty. . . . . The issue is not whether the administration intentionally falsified the intelligence but whether the administration was diligent enough in pursuing accurate intelligence—and whether the administration hyped the intelligence it had obtained to sell the war.

Yet Frost goes on to defend the Democratic call for an investigation into the uses Bush et al. put the available intelligence, saying "[I]t is perfectly reasonable to inquire about how the administration got it so terribly wrong and why it hyped this intelligence so aggressively."

Here I disagree. Yes, it is reasonable to inquire into the issue. Just not now.

A Congressional investigation into how the Administration spun intelligence will never answer any question that has any immediate relevance. It will necessarily be little more than frenzy of fingerpointing. Yes, there may be some lessons to be learned, and yes, we should study what happened. But we should do it later. Like 10 years or so from now. For now, the central fact is clear: regradless of who is to blame, we went into war based on assumptions or beliefs that were not true. No one disputes that. Whether Bush alone is to blame or whether Congress and the Democrats share that blame is not really all that important right now. Answering questions like that is why God invented historians. For no, we have more urgent problems to deal with.