[api]

People still have not wrapped their heads around just how much damage the WMD lie has done to American democracy and to the entire underlying trust basis of our civilization.

That's one reason I still consider Bush II to have been a worse president than Trump and probably the worst president of the last 100 years (at least). Trump was far more of a clown, but Bush II did more damage. Trump also would never have happened were it not for Bush II.

Bush set fire to America in order to set fire to a trillion dollars in Iraq and accomplish nothing (except indirectly creating ISIS). It's just staggeringly awful, and it's embarrassing that nobody is in prison.

[meowface]

Part of the issue behind this topic is it's still hotly contested where in the chain there were lies and where there was mistaken belief in information.

There's no doubt Bush's actions were utterly disastrous for America and many other countries, as well as their people, but it becomes a very different debate when you consider the two scenarios of Bush lying and Bush believing the intel, and then sub-scenarios like if Bush was primarily misled or mistakenly misinformed.

Hypothetically, there could have been no lying anywhere in the chain (even among the lowest-level intelligence analysts and informants), or some scattered lying, or a ton of it from bottom to top. Until that question is satisfactorily answered, it's hard to know who, if anyone, should belong in prison over the matter.

One of the most impactful consequences is that in most debates I now see, very few people believe the intelligence community when they make any claims about anything, including almost two decades later. For example, claims of election interference and espionage by the Russian government can be and frequently are easily dismissed by citing the WMD incident.

That alone has driven a lot of the civil tension over the past 4 years. (And of course this will remain the case no matter how one considers the deceit vs. mistake argument, since either way it means the IC is much harder to trust.)

[coldtea]

>Hypothetically, there could have been no lying anywhere in the chain

Very hypothetically though. I don't know of many countries where they'd believe "not lying involved" to be the case (or even the higher echelons not knowing it, much less someone like DWB).

This appears to be a naivety unique to the US and a very few other places - perhaps because most people never had much issue to distrust the system in their personal lives, they get screwed over only in aggregate or abstract political ways. Any country that has had a more direct experience of history unfolding (wars, dictatorships, meddling, etc) knows this isn't the case. I guess blacks in the US did have such an experience (e.g. Jim Crow and other actions against them, open and convert - e.g. MLK/FBI).

>For example, claims of election interference and espionage by the Russian government can be and frequently are easily dismissed by citing the WMD incident.

As they should, unless evidence is given (and real evidence, not the kind usually given "we found some russian IP involved" etc, as this is fool proof, not to mention we have to trust them on having found it).

Historically intelligence agencies have lied again and again (judging from when they are sometimes cought or stuff gets unclassified over time), and on purpose, and it's not some bad apple/incompetence involved, it's matter of policy (basically their role is not to "find the truth" but to "serve the given objectives/create a narrative").