| Friday, November 11, 2005 |
| Bush fights the neocons' battles ... again |
At the start of this week, the neocons apparently tired of watching the president take a beating in the polls over their Iraq war, and urged him to fight back. Five days later, just as they previously did with Charles Krauthammer on the Miers yanking, the Bush team picked up the necon playbook and followed it.
Today, President Bush and his neocon NSA advisor Stephen Hadley lead the charge to rebut critics of the war. Their argument: the critics are rewriting history, since, just as the neocons (Stephen Hayes, David Frum and Kristol principally) have been urging the Bushies to argue, they saw the same intel the president did, and they believed it just as the president did. (The argument sounds a lot like my kids' argument for why one has hit the other -- he hit me, too!) The implication of the argument is that any of them -- John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, Jay Rockefellar -- would have launched the invasion had they been in Bush's place.
But here's the problem: those members of Congress, including Democrats, who voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq if he deemed it necessary, did not see the same intelligence that the White House did. In fact, there's reason to believe that the White House didn't see all of the intelligence, but rather a version of the intelligence that was picked clean of dissent by the Likudnik cabal operating out of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's offices. (More on the cabal's present dilemmas here, and an excellent summary of the president's dilemma by none other than William F. Buckley here).
Tags: Iraq, Middle East, War, Terrorism, Foreign Policy |
posted by JReid @ 2:21 PM   |
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