Keep digging

AP:

The White House sought to deflect politically charged questions Wednesday about President Bush's use of prewar intelligence in Iraq, saying Democrats, too, had concluded Saddam Hussein was a threat.

"If Democrats want to talk about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed and the intelligence, they might want to start with looking at the previous administration and their own statements that they've made," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Of course, the difference remains that Clinton did not mount a massive public relations campaign and convince the populace that we needed to invade Iraq. And the point of the investigation is not to find out who believed what, but rather why the current Bush administration was so gung-ho to believe the intelligence that supported their claims while ignoring cooler, saner heads. The questions remains: did this administration manipulate intelligence to lead us into Iraq. And that answer remains to be hashed out.

That aside, I say investigate all of it. Something went wrong with the intelligence leading up the war. Whether it started with Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, or Bush II should not matter. The American public would be better served by investigating the root causes of these errors to better protect us in the future.