Rosa Brooks is a senior fellow at New America and a law professor at Georgetown University. From 2009 to 2011, she served as a senior adviser to the undersecretary of defense for policy. She is also the author of a book review in the April 16 Washington Post of Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger’s ISIS State of Terror in which she says some reasonable things, going so far as to remark that ISIS is not an “existential threat,” but unfortunately tosses in one statement of surpassing dumbness, to wit—“False U.S. assumptions about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda led to the Iraq war, which turned Iraq into the very terrorist hotbed we had imagined it already to be ….”
Dr. Brooks, no one imagined Iraq to be a “terrorist hotbed”. People inside and outside the Bush Administration pretended to believe that, but they knew it wasn’t true. There were no “false assumptions,” only falsified ones. Everyone knew that there were no contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Everyone knew that, even you. The invasion of Iraq was not an honest mistake. It was a deliberate fraud. The perpetrators of that fraud were confident that they could somehow transform Iraq from a belligerent totalitarian dictatorship into a meekly obedient client state simply by showing up. When all that blew up in their faces they’ve been lying about it ever since. But you don’t have to lie about it. So why are you?
Afterwords
Why is Dr. Brooks lying on behalf of the Bush Administration, when she wasn’t even part of it? My guess is, Beltway etiquette: I don’t tell the truth about you, and you don’t tell the truth about me.
