Tom Diemer
Politics Daily
March 4, 2010
Karl Rove, the White House adviser whom George W. Bush called his political “architect,” admits in a new memoir that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq severely damaged the Bush presidency — and he suggests the war might not have occurred had Bush actually known the truth.
Of his own role, Rove writes that his biggest mistake was not pushing back against claims that the president had led the country into the Iraq war under false pretenses.
If Bush had known about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, Rove questions whether the United States would have gone to war, according to an excerpt quoted by the New York Times. “Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D., I doubt it,” Rove writes. “Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change and deal with Iraq’s horrendous human rights violations.”
