The Bush administration has cast itself in a new role in the Iraq fiasco: innocent victim. With Iraq expected to be key to President George Bush’s re-election chances this fall, the rewriting of history has begun in earnest; events leading up to the war have been given an extensive nip and tuck, leaving them barely recognizable.

Perhaps you recall how eager the Bush administration was to invade Iraq last year?

If so, you’re mistaken. Senior administration officials weren’t determined to invade Iraq, they were simply the victims of faulty intelligence. There they were, just minding their own business, when incompetent underlings kept hounding them with false information showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and close links to Al Qaeda.

What choice did they have but to invade?

This notion of Bush officials as passive victims of faulty intelligence is being cultivated with the help of a recently-released U.S. Senate committee report, which documents how U.S. intelligence agencies erroneously exaggerated Iraq’s weapons arsenal.

The report’s value is limited, however, since the committee’s Democrats and Republicans agreed in advance to restrict their investigation to the role played by the intelligence agencies, deferring until after the election the more pertinent question about the role played by the White House in distorting information about Iraq.

Needless to say, this is convenient for a president anxious to disassociate himself from the colossal misinformation used to justify a war that has already killed almost 900 Americans and thousands of Iraqis, as well as generating anti-American feeling around the world.

The theory of the Bush team’s victimhood is going largely unchallenged by media commentators, who seem content to suggest we were all caught up in “groupthink” about Iraq.

That seemed to be the position taken by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview last week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which, although on the comedy network, is one of the most informative U.S. news programs.

“We should have been more skeptical,” said Blitzer, suggesting a kind of collective responsibility for buying into theories about Iraq’s WMD.

What do you mean “we,” white man?

In fact, beyond the elite circle of political and media insiders that Blitzer inhabits, skepticism was rampant.

Among the skeptics was chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who clarified for the world — weeks before the U.S. invasion began — that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq, at least not any that he or his team of experts could find after several months of intensive searching.

Blix made this point emphatically to the U.N. on February 14, 2003, when he contradicted key aspects of the U.S. case. The U.N.’s top nuclear inspector, Mohammed ElBaradei, also reported that day that he’d failed to find evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

So, regardless of the flawed information the Bush team had been receiving from its own intelligence agencies — the CIA didn’t have any undercover agents actually inside Iraq — the Blix and ElBaradei reports clearly alerted the administration to the possibility of serious problems with the information.

In fact, even some U.S. intelligence officials had expressed concerns to the administration about the reliability of information coming from the Iraqi exile community, which was the Bush team’s favourite source of information on WMD. Furthermore, U.S. intelligence officials had warned that reports of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda were not credible.

But the administration — particularly Vice-President Dick Cheney — refused to hear such talk, constantly pushing intelligence officials to accentuate the Iraqi threat. All this is recounted in a detailed report by four investigative journalists on the run-up to war, published in the May issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

So, given the warning signals from both U.S. intelligence officials and the U.N. inspectors, Bush officials clearly had grounds for doubting the case against Iraq.

The solution seemed obvious — hold the bombs, give inspections more time. But the administration clearly wanted to get on with the war. When it refused to back down after Blix’s powerful presentation to the U.N., the world practically choked in disbelief.

The next day, February 15, more than 10 million people took part in protests worldwide. Without access to intelligence data, with nothing more than their own questioning minds, millions of ordinary people had figured out what journalists had been unable or unwilling to see — that there were glaring flaws in the U.S. case for war.

The Bush administration would have us believe that its reckless rush to war can be blamed on an intelligence failure, and on “groupthink.”

Another possibility is that the Bush team willfully chose to blind itself to what millions of people around the world had no trouble spotting.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...