Speaking in Dallas about Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine, President George W. Bush made a Freudian slip. It was the
“decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of
Iraq,” former president George W. Bush said Wednesday before correcting himself to
say Ukraine.

Reaction from partisans was quick and
brutal. They called Bush a war
criminal, declared the Iraq war illegal, and declared Bush responsible for
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.

All points miss the mark.

First, Bush did not lie; the intelligence
was wrong. The reason was that signals intelligence like phone intercepts
affirmed the human intelligence gathered by the intelligence community. CIA and
DIA polygraphs of defectors can only determine deception, not truth. If Saddam
Hussein bluffed, defectors would believe information that was false while Iraqi
officials in Baghdad would chatter about it, also believing it true. The true
politicization of intelligence came after few weapons of mass destruction
turned up when various Washington bureaucracies scrambled to exculpate their
responsibility while too many journalists embraced partisan narratives that
made good headlines and generated clicks but never passed the smell test.

Second, Bush was not solely responsible
for the decision. The majority of congressmen and senators voted in favor of
military action as they were operating from the same bad intelligence as the
White House.

Third, the Iraq war was not illegal. Bush
based his action on pre-existing Chapter VII UN Security Council resolutions
from 13 years before, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War when Saddam did
truly hide a covert nuclear program after his own son-in-law defected to Jordan
with a treasure trove of documents. To call the war illegal is to create
expiration dates for every existing Chapter VII resolution, a precedent that
could lead to an immediate end to the UN mission separating North and South
Korea.

Finally, while many Iraqis died in the
war, beware of the passive voice. The vast majority of Iraqis killed—the
hundreds of thousands pundits so readily throw about—died at the hands of insurgent
bombs or Iranian-backed militias. True, that pressure cooker may never have
exploded had Bush not launched the war but, then again, Syria shows it might
have. The point is that blaming Bush for those deaths, when American forces and
their Iraqi allies were trying to protect Iraqis and end the sectarian strife,
exculpates those who actually staked out schools and markets to place bombs
that might maximize casualties. Unfortunately, the irony here is that the
current White House—by lifting, waiving, or simply not enforcing many sanctions
on Iran—is rewarding the very forces who were culpable of war crimes.

Politics in Washington is a blood sport, but accuracy matters. The United States was, is, and remains a force for good in the world. Bush is no Putin or Khamenei. Nor, for that matter, is the United States in any way like Russia or Iran.

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