Rove admits Iraq war was fought as a result of false intelligence, claims Bush would not have invaded had he known the truth

Bush 'would not have invaded had he known about WMD'
Blair would have gone in anyway – but Bush was more cautious, says Karl Rove
(The Independent) -- By David Usborne --

George Bush would not have invaded Iraq – and taken Britain into a disastrous war – had he known that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was simply wrong, Karl Rove, the former president's top political consigliere, explosively suggests in a book that is to be published next week.

But Mr Rove, probably the most controversial of all the figures in the inner political circle of the former president, and who nowadays serves up his conservative ruminations to Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, insists that his erstwhile boss believed the intelligence. Claims that he deliberately misled the American people were untrue and the failure by the White House to counter them was "one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years".

The memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, offers both revealing and frivolous anecdotes from the inner workings of the Bush administration, ranging from Rove losing a sock at Buckingham Palace to his brush with prosecution after the leaking of the identity of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame.

It is his stunningly frank admission that the Iraq war was fought under entirely false pretences, however, that will bring wide attention to the book, copies of which have been seen by some US outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

It also threatens to peel new paint from the edifice erected by Tony Blair to defend his hewing so closely to Mr Bush as the invasion unfolded. Mr Blair told a BBC interviewer last year that he probably would have moved ahead with removing Saddam Hussein from power even had he known that the narrative about weapons of mass destruction was fictional by finding different ways to justify it.

Not everyone will accept the notion that the White House was as out-of-the-loop about the facts on WMD as the book says. But Mr Rove says that, without the WMD storyline, Mr Bush would surely have backed away from military action even if he, the writer, still believes it would have been justified.

"Would the Iraq war have occurred without WMD? I doubt it," Mr Rove contends in the book. "The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam."...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Since Rove's admission is just the latest piece of evidence shaping the now-common knowledge that the intelligence used to rationalize the invasion of Iraq (a war that has caused the deaths of somewhere between 95,000 and 655,000 people, and cost the American taxpayers over $700 billion) was fabricated, why isn't the Office of Special Plans self-described "Cabal" that nested in the Pentagon during the run up to the Iraq war, and that assembled that false intelligence, today being investigated and held accountable for their crimes against humanity?

Could it be because a similar group with a similar motives is today attempting to hoodwink America into a similar war against Iran, and because Big Government Washington is playing right along with the scheme, just as it did with the Iraq war?

Or perhaps it's because the cover story that Rove is rehashing today, after a similar story by Dick Cheney, that the poor, blinkered Bush administration was misled by bad intelligence, is itself farcical, and because everyone in Big Government Washington knew all along that WMD's (along with absurd claims that Saddam was tied to 9/11) were but a clever pretense for invasion.