REALLY OUTRAGEOUS

Posted at 8:46 a.m. ET

The hatred of President Bush is taking no holiday, even in this season of supposed good will.  We would have hoped that the mainstream media would at least restrain some of its worst instincts, as the Bush administration enters its final five weeks.  That hope would be in vain.

One of the wildest anti-Bush attacks appeared in an editorial yesterday in The San Francisco Chronicle.  What angers us is the casualness with which the Chronicle ignores facts and history.

The Chronicle quotes Mr. Bush's regret, stated recently, that intelligence about Iraq's WMD turned out to be wrong.  The president did not blame anyone.  He simply stated his regret.  To the Chronicle, though, this was perfidy:

The president's attempt to disassociate himself from accountability for the phony pretext for war is simply outrageous.

No, what's outrageous is the Chronicle's attempt to portray Mr. Bush as disassociating himself from accountability.  He neither said nor implied anything of the kind.  Ever.  And the term "phony pretext" is inflammatory and misleading.  Virtually all major intelligence agencies believed Iraq had WMD.

The Bush administration was sounding alarms - such as Rice's January 2003 suggestion that ceding to uncertainty might cause the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" - even though U.N. inspectors were coming up empty.

For the record, the UN believed Iraq had WMD.  Added to the record, even though we didn't find stockpiles of WMD after we entered Iraq, we did find WMD programs in place, to be restarted after the UN sanctions were lifted.  That discovery has been downplayed by the mainstream media, even though it is critical to understanding the Iraq weapons picture.

Most infamously, Bush's 2003 State of the Union address included the 16 words claiming that Hussein had tried to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium, even though red flags had been raised within the State Department about the veracity of the claims.

Most infamously?  The Chronicle had a journalistic obligation to point out that Great Britain, which supplied the information, stands behind it.  There is other evidence, ignored by the Chronicle, suggesting that those 16 words were accurate.  The term "most infamously" is, again, misleading and inflammatory.

The best that can be said of the Bush White House is that it was insufficiently vigilant about scrutinizing the intelligence it presented to the world to justify a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that has cost more than 4,200 American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars a year - and incalculable damage to U.S. stature in the world. At worst, it was a campaign of deceit. Historians will be taking a close look at the substantial evidence that the Bush administration was determined to engage Iraq in war from the day it assumed power - and used the fear and confusion in the aftermath of 9/11 to sell this war to the public.

Wild, wild, wild.  Didn't Colin Powell spend days at the CIA, personally examining the intelligence?  Where is the deceit?  Show it.  The fact is, as Douglas J. Feith points out in his book, "War and Decision," the intelligence hadn't changed since the Clinton administration.  Yet the Chronicle doesn't accuse Mr. Clinton of deceit.  Wonder why. 

And there is no evidence that the Bush administration was determined to go to war in Iraq from its first days.  It knew Iraq was a problem, and war might be an option.  But the Chronicle overstretches.

History will not forget that the rationale for this war - which has brought so much death, debt and misery - was thoroughly discredited.

They just won't give up.  Again, those WMD programs were in place.  Iraq is now a fledgling, if fragile democracy.  Hatred of Bush, though, is a religion that is being pursued, regardless of facts.

Bad journalism.  Another reason why people are turning away from newspapers.

December 15, 2008.