By Ankush
I expect that a great many people reading this blog watched John Edwards’s appearance on Meet the Press this
morning with some interest. For the record, I like Edwards quite a bit,
but I have to say that I continue to be seriously annoyed by the way he
constructs his apologies for supporting the use of force resolution for
Iraq.
As he did in his much-ballyhooed op-ed in the Post
in November 2005, Edwards continues to blame flawed intelligence for
his decision to back the Bush administration. When asked by Russert why
he was wrong about the war, Edwards responded that “the intelligence
information we got was wrong, tragically wrong.” He also noted that he
spoke with former Clinton officials, as if that exhausted the universe
of knowledgeable foreign policy thinkers.
But since we’retalking these days about lessons to learn from Iraq, it seems helpfulto point out another one that Edwards apparently has yet to process –that he, like most politicians during the run-up to the war, was very bad at assessing intelligence when the political winds were pushing him in a particular direction.
