Reddit reviews No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

I recommend reading this entire article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-wmds-an-intelligence-failure-or-white-house-spin/

..But in case you can't, here's their conclusion:

>The intelligence community’s assessments on Iraq’s WMD stockpiles and programs turned out to be woefully wrong, largely because analysts believed that Iraq had kept on a path of building its programs rather than largely abandoning them after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Thus the stockpiles theoretically got larger as time went on.

>But at the same time, the Senate report shows Bush administration officials often hyped the intelligence that supported their policy goals — while ignoring or playing down dissents or caveats from within the intelligence community. The intelligence was used for political purposes, to build public support for a war that might have been launched no matter what intelligence analysts had said about the prospect of finding WMDs in Iraq.

>(We do not know whether Bush read the dissents in the NIE. His memoir just says the NIE was based on “much of the same intelligence the CIA had been showing to me for the past eighteen months.” Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote in her memoir that "NSC Principals, all experienced people, read the NIE from cover to cover.” The National Security Council is chaired by the president, and regular attendees include the vice president, secretary of state, defense secretary, treasury secretary and national security adviser.)

>Fleischer says it is “a lie” that Bush lied. Regular readers know we generally do not use the word “lie." Fleischer is offering his opinion — one that conveniently ignores the Senate report that looked at this issue. His own deputy at the time certainly said the White House spun the intelligence for political purposes, while Fleischer still argues that White House was misled by the intelligence community.