Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush's new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10):

As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq's weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. "I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war," he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible.

The accumulating evidence at the time showed that Iraq lacked a nuclear weapons program and did not have biological weapons either. As for its chemical weapons program, while harder to ferret out, it not only no longer existed, but even if it had, it was insufficient reason to go to war. Poison gas has been around since the Second Battle of Ypres. That was 1915. "The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat," Bush writes. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

The late 2010 version of Richard Cohen is certainly up to speed on the pre-war Iraq intelligence. Unfortunately, the 2003 Richard Cohen wasn't, as he most memorably wrote about Colin Powell's UN presentation (2/6/03):

The evidence he presented to the United Nations--some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail--had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman--could conclude otherwise.

In that column, Cohen acknowledged the nuclear evidence was weak, but the chemical/biological weapons case was "so strong--so convincing--it hardly mattered that nukes may be years away, and thank God for that."

He also wrote that at the UN presentation, "when the by-now hoary charge was made that a link existed between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad, it was Powell who made it--and it hit with force." So a hoary charge sounded convincing coming from Colin Powell. Is the idea that Powell's just a better liar than Bush?

NBC star Matt Lauer's one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn from Lauer's mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview:

The Florida recount.  Hanging chads.  A divided Supreme Court.  George Bush had a rough road to the White House.

Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million. By many reasonable standards, he should have lost the Florida recount too. The Supreme Court made him the president. I'm not sure "rough" is the right way to describe what happened to him.

And then there was this passage on the Iraq War:

LAUER: He says he eventually decided to go to war based on Saddam Hussein's defiance… and what seemed to be rock-solid intelligence.  [To Bush:] On the subject of WMD, George Tenet famously said, "It's a slam dunk."

BUSH: Yes. The intelligence.

LAUER: The intelligence is.  So by the time you gave the order to start military operations in Iraq, did you personally have any doubt, any shred of doubt, about that intelligence?

BUSH: No, I didn't.  I really didn't.

LAUER: Not everybody thought you should go to war, though.  There were dissenters.

BUSH: Of course there were.

LAUER: Did you filter them out?

BUSH: I was--I was a dissenting voice.  I didn't wanna use force.

Saddam Hussein's "defiance" of... what, exactly? The U.N. weapons inspections were underway (and were finding little to support U.S. claims about Iraq's WMD programs). The U.S. failed to win Security Council approval for the military strikes and invasion, but went forward nonetheless.

The problem isn't merely that Lauer did so little to push back against Bush's version of history-- in this case, he provided it. If Lauer is going to bring up the fact that there were "dissenters"--Bush's absurd claim that he was one surely deserved some response--he should have pointed out that some of that dissent came early, from people who believed the "slam dunk" intelligence on Iraq's weapons wasn't a slam dunk at all. But then you'd be pointing out that one of the favorite media tropes about the Iraq War--that "everyone got it wrong"--is false. And the kind of journalist who would do that is the kind of journalist who wouldn't win an exclusive interview with George W. Bush.