Marco Rubio was recently confronted by — of all places, Fox News — on flip-flopping on “going to war” with Iraq.

He tried to say that if he were president at the time he would have invaded Iraq based on the “intelligence” (neocon lies) available.

Anybody who knew anything about Iraq and Saddam Hussein in 2003 would have known there were not WMDs in the country and that Hussein was not collaborating with al-Qaeda.

Rubio would have followed in Bush’s footsteps, not because he would have been fooled by the neocons — what the media calls an “intelligence failure” — but because invading Iraq was what the establishment wanted.

John Glaser writes:

In addition to widespread assessments… from people on the inside, it’s clear from the historical record that the Bush administration did not base their decision to go to war in Iraq on intelligence assessing Iraq had WMDs. As CBS News reported in 2009, “barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq.”

The hodgepodge of justifications sputtering out from the administration in the lead up to the war also undercuts the argument that anyone was truly concerned about an actual WMD threat. Officials justified war on the basis of everything from an unsubstantiated connection to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks to Saddam’s own human rights violations to spreading democracy, among others.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” British intelligence officials said in a discussion with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at the time. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

These facts are not part of the interview with Rubio. Fox News and the establishment media have built a lie atop the original lie — it was bad intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq that cost over a million Iraqis their lives, not a con job cooked up by a gaggle of neocons in the Bush administration and the Pentagon.

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