Originally Posted by DVPGSR
I think that depends.
It is not a big shift to discuss pre-war intelligence faults. That is something that has always been known and addressed, hence Tenet is no longer there.
The big shift that I see is the admiting of mistakes in Iraq and that they are correcting them. The problem with admitting mistakes is that the opposition will jump all over them and ignore the bigger picture to play politics.
I think that was Kestrel's (or should I say Gary Fisher's) point. Admitting mistakes and discussing pre-war intelligence "faults" are the same thing with the Bush administration.
Yes, there is a political cost to admitting mistakes, but the longer you wait, the higher it gets. This was Clinton's problem with his little scandal. Bush has done the same thing. Lots of people have known for years that he didn't decide to go into Iraq based on CIA intelligence, and now, in December 2005, he's still in the stage of admitting that there was something amiss and distancing himself from the biased intelligence that his cabinet cultivated.