Judith Miller: No, I Didn't Start the Iraq War

Former Times reporter sets out to dispel 'false narratives'
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 4, 2015 11:44 AM CDT
Judith Miller: No, I Didn't Start the Iraq War
Judith Miller in 2007.   (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf, File)

If you're familiar with the name Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter has a pretty good idea why: "I took America to war in Iraq," she writes in the Wall Street Journal. "It was all me." This is Miller's tongue-in-cheek introduction to an essay in which she sets out to dispel "false narratives" about the lead-up to the war that still persist. Miller acknowledges that some of her stories in the Times about Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction were wrong. But the incorrect information was not "spoon-fed" to her by White House officials knowingly perpetrating a lie. Her reporting was based on the same credible sources that had informed her earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning work, she writes.

"I have never met George W. Bush," writes Miller. "I never discussed the war with Dick Cheney until the winter of 2012, years after he had left office and I had left the Times. I wish I could have interviewed senior officials before the war about the role that WMDs played in the decision to invade Iraq," but that never happened. The Bush White House, she adds, is guilty of "errors in judgment" and lousy intelligence about Iraq's WMDs, but that's "not the same as lying." Bush himself wasn't a rube manipulated by Cheney or trying to enrich his friends, and analysts weren't pressured to make stuff up. Nor did powerful neoconservatives feed phony WMD stories to reporters such as Miller. None of it is true, and "these false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired." Click for Miller's full column. (More Judith Miller stories.)

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