BUSH: EITHER UNSERIOUS, OR A LIAR
You have only those two choices

Hesiod says in this post on David Kay's call for an investigation into the Iraq intel failures:

Now, if you were President of the United States, and you discovered that one of the central reasons you sent our young men and women to fight and die in a war was faulty or poor intelligence on the country we invaded, you would be livid with anger, right?

You would be calling for heads to roll, firing people left and right, and demanding that a full investigation be launched to get to the bottom of it.

After all, if our intelligence was so bad in this case, what other important information is also so utterly wrong? You'd want to fix the problem right away, to protect this country's national security.

That's what any President would do, Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal, if the facts I described (and David Kay describes) are true.

Any sane, rational, competent, and responsible President, anyway.

So what is the White House's view on investigating pre-war Iraq intelligence "failures?" They seem awfully non-chalant about the whole thing, don't they? They don't seem particularly concerned, or upset. There are no reports of President Bush chewing out George Tenet, or Condi Rice. No one's been fired. No one's even been reprimanded, as far as we know! In fact, they are downright hostile to the very idea of such an investigation.

How can that be?

He's quite right. Even when the Bushies have tried to sound serious about finding the supposed Iraqi WMD, their reasons have been clear: To demonstrate that their professed rationale for going to war was legitimate.

Think about it. Let's say the Bush administration had intelligence that Iraq had all the chemical and biological weapons that Dubya mentioned in the 2003 State of the Union address and Powell mentioned a few days later at the United Nations. And let's also assume that Bush and his people actually believed all that intelligence was accurate. And then we invade Iraq, topple the Ba'athist regime, and have hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground, not to mention David Kay's team searching for WMD. And after several months of searching, none are found.

So for all that to be true, the Bushies, who allegedly believe their pre-war intelligence, know that there are Iraqi WMD, but they can't find them. Isn't that, um, a concern to national security? Especially after all that looting and chaos immediately after our entrance into Baghdad? And if there were also Al Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq, as Bush and especially Cheney have suggested, couldn't those loose WMD that the Bushies know exist but they can't find, fall into the hands of people much more dangerous to us than Saddam ever was? Have we heard a peep from the Bushies about any concerns like this? The only thing we hear is a message of "we will be vindicated".

If the Bushies were bullshitting us from day one, that's inexcusable, as well as grounds for immediate impeachment/firings. If, on the other hand, the Bushies wholeheartedly believed the intelligence they told us about in late 2002 and early 2003, then their conduct now is equally as troubling, if not much worse.

Hesiod highlights the important point that there hasn't been any head-rolling in the administration appropriate to the realities of WMD intelligence. But the fact that the administration only wants to find weapons, any weapons at all, just so they can say "I told you so!" not only speaks volumes about the adminstration's character, but gives me very grave doubts about their actual concern for the security of the American population.

In other words, the Bushies show the same amount of concern about fake loose WMD in Iraq as they do about real loose WMD in the former Soviet Union.