Below The Beltway

George W. Bush on the greatest regret of his Presidency:

Looking back on his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush pinpointed incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as “biggest regret of all the presidency.”

“I think I was unprepared for war,” Bush told ABC News’ Charlie Gibson in an interview airing today on “World News.”

“In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, ‘Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack,’” he said. “In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.”

Bush, who has been a stalwart defender of the war in Iraq and maintaining U.S. troop presence there, said, in retrospect, the war exceeded his expectations.

“A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. “It wasn’t just people in my administration. A lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence.

“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” Bush added.

At the very least, I guess Bush should get some credit for admitting at least one of the two fundamental flaws behind the Iraq War — the belief, questioned by some but believed by many, that Saddam Hussein maintained a WMD program that posed a threat to the United States.

The other flaw — the failure to effectively plan for both the war itself and it’s aftermath — is apparently something that Bush doesn’t want to admit to just yet:

When pressed by Gibson, Bush declined to “speculate” on whether he would still have gone to war if he knew Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.

“That is a do-over that I can’t do,” Bush said.

Fortunately, Mr. President, history will allow us to judge your actions and those of your subordinates for what they were.

So far, it’s fairly clear that what I said almost two years ago still rings true:

First, the initial justification for the invasion of Iraq was entirely mistaken. There were no weapons of mass destruction in 2003. They didn’t go to Syria. They just never existed.

Second, while the United States may have had a great plan to defeat the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard in 2003, there was absolutely no plan for what we would do with Iraq afterwards. Instead, we got the statements of people like Paul Wolfowitz, who apparently believed that American troops would be greeted as liberators the minute they crossed the Iraq-Kuwaiti border, and refused to admit he was wrong years later despite all the evidence to the contrary.

We can’t go back in time and change what was done, but we can learn from our mistakes.