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.
