“Bush lied. Who died?” Sadly, this bumper-sticker slogan distills in four words an argument that many Democrats have loudly repeated since the president’s decision to war to liberate Iraq a little less than 25 months ago. A whole literature now exists on how a dark “cabal” of neoconservatives pressured hapless intelligence professionals to conclude things they did not believe about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemicals and germs. The pre-war intelligence, according to the war critics, was manipulated to deceive the public, the international community, and Congress.

We’ve never bought into this line of reasoning. Anyone who did has one more good reason to abandon it now with the findings of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. The commission found that any errors in estimates of Iraq’s nuclear capabilities and its stocks of biological and chemical weapons were a result of poor trade craft and sloppy analysis, not the political pressure of a president rushing to war.

The bipartisan panel chaired by federal judge Laurence Silberman and a former Democratic senator, Governor Robb of Virginia, “found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs,” its report concluded. It was a distinguished commission whose members included Senator McCain, who is usually a darling of the press, and Lloyd Cutler, who served for a time as President Clinton’s White House counsel.

So what of all those in the press who pounced on a story line that chalked any mistakes in intelligence assessment up to the pressure of hawkish policy-makers intent on inventing a reason to end Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror? The New Republic made much of personal visits Vice President Cheney made to CIA headquarters to review the intelligence on Iraq. Seymour Hersh devoted an article to what he called “stove piping,” or the practice of selectively giving intelligence to policy makers before it was properly analyzed by the intelligence community. Mother Jones magazine spun tales of a pernicious “Lie Factory” inside the Pentagon. The breathless accounts of neoconservative pressure on the CIA served a useful purpose. It gave the Democrats something to say about a war its leaders initially supported but desperately wanted to oppose in the election season.

It wasn’t just the press but the Democratic Party’s leading politicians who bought into the intelligence “manipulation” myth. Senator Kennedy told the Council on Foreign Relations on March 5 last year, “The more we find out, the clearer it becomes that any failure in the intelligence itself is dwarfed by the Administration’s manipulation of the intelligence in making the case for war. Specific warnings from the intelligence community were consistently ignored as the Administration rushed toward war.”

If anything, it turns out the claim that Bush lied was a convenient way for the CIA to pass off its own failures before the Iraq war and for the Democrats to avoid taking a serious position on the war. If the Democrats are smart, they will take the Silberman-Robb commission’s findings as a hint that complaining about nonexistent intelligence manipulation is not a substitute for a thoughtful national security policy.

As for the Republicans, they seem to be welcoming the report’s recommendations and findings. “I thought the commission did a very good job,” Vice President Cheney told The New York Sun editorial board in a meeting Friday. “I’d give them high marks.” He said he thought “the vast majority” of the commission’s recommendations should be adopted, and he seemed particularly enthusiastic about the idea of creating an intelligence directorate for “open-source information.” Mr. Cheney noted that there have been other intelligence failures, speaking of the failure to predict the Pearl Harbor attack at the start of World War II and the failure to predict the defeat of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. The Silberman-Robb Commission, as our Eli Lake noted Friday, warned that even now it is hard to tell whether Libya has given up all of its biological and chemical weapons programs.

This history of failures is an argument for making improvements where possible in the intelligence community. But it is also an argument for pursuing certain policies – deploying missile defense systems, fielding a large and well-equipped military as a deterrent, bringing free and democratic regimes to places like Syria and Iran – that make America’s safety less reliant overall on the accuracy of intelligence.