BUT YOU TOLD ME TRUMP HATED THE IRAQ WAR WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS

Donald Trump who swore on a stack of Bibles that he loathed the Iraq War with every fiber of his being, may be about to appoint this guy as CIA director:

Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, an ex-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he would accept the job of CIA director if it were offered to him by President-elect Donald Trump....

Hoekstra said he has been in communication with Trump’s transition team “on a regular basis” to discuss “a number of different things,” but declined to detail any specifics of those conversations. He said he is currently an informal adviser to the transition team and that he was “working through the details” as to what more formal role he might play.

As Martin Longman (BooMan) reminds us, years after the Bush administration's case for the Iraq War had been thoroughly discredited, Hoekstra was a Saddam-had-WMDs dead-ender:

Back in 2005, Hoekstra was obsessed with proving that we had not gone to war in Iraq under false pretenses or even under the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He pressured the Bush administration to release online troves of sensitive documents that had been seized in Iraq so that right-wing bloggers could comb through them for supporting evidence.

... Hoekstra won his argument and {Director of National Intelligence John] Negroponte posted the cache of documents on the internet.

... The result was predictable. They found no evidence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq.

"But," Longman adds, "they did publish a handy-dandy guide to building a nuclear weapon."

More:

... In the midst of all this nonsense about the “real unexamined evidence” that Saddam Hussein had WMD, Hoekstra held a press conference in June 2006 where he asserted that the case had been proven, at least as far as chemical weapons were concerned. But, he was wrong.

At issue is a classified overview of chemical munitions found in Iraq since 2003 that was completed in April by the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center. One of the report’s key findings was that since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, coalition forces have recovered about 500 shells, canisters or other munitions that contain degraded mustard gas or sarin nerve agent.

That finding was seized on by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence....

Yesterday, however, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel, said the study contained “nothing new” ...

That assertion was backed up by representatives of three intelligence agencies who told reporters that the study differed little from a 2004 report of a team of American weapons inspectors led by Charles A. Duelfer....

The intelligence officials ... said that the munitions referred to in the report were produced before the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and that they had degraded and could not be used as designed. “There is no evidence today of any post-1991 WMD munitions,” said the official....

Some supposedly intelligent people will tell you that, while Donald Trump initially supported the Iraq War, his eventual opposition to it is a sign that he has convincingly broken with Republican orthodoxy on the use of force. And yet Pete Hoekstra could be his CIA director.

Trump dislikes wars that his Russian buddies disapprove of, and he dislikes wars that give him a vicarious sense of loserhood. Otherwise, Trump's vaunted war skepticism is a fraud.