Confusing headline of the day

15 December 2005, 0118 EST

Say what?

Did Bush say, in effect, “I’m to blame for the bad intelligence”? Is he taking the blame for using bad intelligence? I know he didn’t take the blame for Iraq’s enduring struggle against poor intel.

Turns out, none of the above:

“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq, and I am also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities and we’re doing just that,” he said.

What Bush actually said is that he was responsible for the decision to invade, and that he’s responsible for reforming the intelligence agencies.

He’s right.

As the head of the Executive Branch, he is indeed responsible for Executive agencies. Given that Congress long ago lost the battle (War Powers Act notwithstanding) for control over the decision to use American military force to the Executive Branch, Bush is indeed responsible for the US invasion of Iraq. It was, after all, his decision.

But nothing in this statement – or any other ones I’ve been able to find from his Fox News interview – suggests that he’s taking any real blame for the gross inaccuracies his administration used to justify the war.

Filed as: bad intelligence

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.