Return of the Neo-Cons?

Business Insider says that Trump is considering several Iraq war supporters for top national-security positions:

Despite his professed opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, President-elect Donald Trump is considering several of the major advocates of that war for top national security posts in his administration, according to Republican officials.

Among those who could find places on Trump's team are former top State Department official John Bolton and ex-CIA Director James Woolsey. Both men championed the Iraq invasion ... .

Also involved in transition planning for Trump's presidency is Frederick Fleitz, a top aide to Bolton who earlier worked at the CIA unit that validated much of the flawed intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

I wrote a very long essay in 2005 about whether the Bush administration had "bent" the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons program to justify taking down his regime by armed force ("Cooking the War," Nov. 15, 2005):

The question of the accuracy of the intelligence regarding Saddam and WMDs is certainly legitimate. Questions about the conduct of war are legitimate - I have not been kind at times to the administration about that, especially about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's deliberate discarding of studies by the Army Staff before the war that the prospective invasion force was to small by about half to secure the country effectively when organized resistance ceased.  I don't have a problem with inquiring whether the intelligence was "bent" by the administration. But it's been done. The Senate Intelligence Committee addressed at this issue in its "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq."

The Committee found no evidence that the IC's [Intelligence Community's] mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capbilities was the result of political pressure.

The Committee detailed the many failures of the intelligence community, but there was no misuse of the intelligence assessments by the administration. 

I assessed exhaustively how this conclusion was supported by the administration, by the Congress (including Hillary Clinton and Jay Rockefeller of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both of whom voted for the Iraq war), and by the testimony and documents provided to the UN Security Council by Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.

Whether the appointments Business Insider reports or speculates will turn out to be good ones for the country in the four years to come is certainly no foregone conclusion. But they do not deserve to be smeared with false charges that they cooked the intelligence books to go to war with Saddam.