| Sunday, November 06, 2005 |
| ... and speaking of history's judgment... |
The Neocons are out in force, attempting to push the president to protect himself -- and them -- from history's judgment on Iraq. They know, and now, the American people should be told clearly and without political-speak, that it was they who pushed the policy of invading Iraq on this president, just as they tried to do with the previous two, and that Iraq's failure isn't just Bush's failure, it's their failure. The neoconservatives are squarely in the bullseye of history's damnation over Iraq (not to mention their disastrous larger agenda), and now, they want the president to once again marshall his political resources to bail them out. Let's start with Bill Kristol, whose headline article in the Weekly Standard this week is entitled "Fight back, Mr. President." Says Kristol:
the administration paid a price for its virtual silence on Iraq during the spring and much of the summer. Now the administration seems to understand not just that they have to do everything they can to win in Iraq--but also that they must make, and remake, the case for the war. Do they also realize that they have to aggressively--not to say indignantly--confront the "Bush lied" charge now emanating from leaders in the Democratic party?
Last Tuesday, Harry Reid took to the floor of the Senate and asserted that the Bush administration had "manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions." This is a serious charge; if it were true, it might well be an indictable offense. But it is, in reality, a slander. Shouldn't the president defend his honor?
After all, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission found no evidence of political manufacture and manipulation of intelligence. The administration's weak and disorganized attempts to respond to Joe Wilson's misrepresentations put the lie to the existence of any campaign to "destroy" opponents of the war. In fact, the administration has done amazingly little to confront, and discredit, attacks from antiwar Democrats. It was a shock last week when White House spokesman Scott McClellan emerged for a few moments from his defensive crouch to point out that Clinton administration officials and Senate Democrats also believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Will he, and others in the administration, return to this theme? Will they call the now antiwar Democrats on their disreputable rewriting of history? Incidentally, are the Democrats ready to defend the proposition that we should have left Saddam in power? Is it okay with them if Zarqawi drives us out of Iraq? Will the administration challenge them as to what their alternative is? Will the administration take the time to put spokesmen forward, and recruit surrogates, to make the case for victory? Or do they enjoy being punching bags at the White House? Kristol ads that "Bush owes it to himself, to his supporters, to the soldiers fighting in Iraq, and to the country to fight back." He fails to mention one other group who feels Bush "owes" them a debt: the ideologues who have been jonesing to invade Iraq for some 15 years.
Also at the Standard, Stephen Hayes continues his useless effort to convince Americans that the pr-war intelligence on Iraq was actually correct (despite all available evidence to the contrary.) Hayes' latest target: a NYT piece today revealing that intel from a key source, presumed to be a "high al-Qaeda official," was doubted by the CIA even before we invaded Iraq. Hayes tries to argue in his piece rebutting the Times, that Democratic claims that the Bush administration went far beyond the known facts in making the case for war are spurious for three reasons: George Tenet made the same allegations Bush did, Senate committees that investigated the intelligence found it credible, and the tried and true "the Clinton administration believed it too." Well, since Tenet is now pretty well known to have been a useless sycophant, who gave Bush "slam dunk" because Bush wanted "slam dunk," and since the GOP-controlled Congress has shown a clear pattern of refusal to draw conclusions on Iraq that could hurt the administration, and since Hayes and his ilk don't trust either the CIA or the Clinton administration in the first place -- it's hard to understand how those three sources become the underpinning for a sound case for war.
Nice try tough, Hayes.
Take three: Fred Barnes tries an even bolder approach: dissing Ronald Reagan. Hayes argues that the advice being given to Bush by "establishment" Republican ex-officials like David Gergen, and on the op-ed pages of the WashPost and New York Times, is political poison being doled out by the hacks who helped Reagan limp out of the White House in weakness following Iran Contra. Yes, that's convincing, Barnes: openly suggest Ronald Reagan's weakness as a way to convince the current administration to be more Reaganesque. Barnes has whisked the cover off a dirty little necon secret: they are not the heirs to the Gipper that they claim, or are assumed, to be.
What none of the Standard writers seem to be interested in is self-reflection. They don't address their own dogmatic campaign to get successive presidents to invade Iraq, and their history of mischief-making inside previous presidential administrations -- always to the detriment of the president they were serving, not to mention to the reputation of the United States. But then, they don't care about those things any more than they care about the beleaguered men and women of the military. These they see as little cogs in their great wheel of history. In the neocon vision, they roll the wheel, the rest of us just get rolled.
Tags: politics, News, neoconservatives, neocons, Bush, Iraq |
posted by JReid @ 1:08 PM   |
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