[Mb-civic] Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall November 12, 2005 02:27 PM

[William Swiggard]

Talking Points - Josh Mitchell
November 12, 2005 -- 02:27 PM EDT

What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president -- caught in his lies, his 
half-truths, his reckless disregard ... caught with, well ... caught 
with time. Time has finally caught up to him. And now he doesn't have 
the popularity to beat back all the people trying to call him to 
account. He could; but now he can't. So he's caught. And his best play 
is to accuse his critics of rewriting history, of playing fast and loose 
with the truth -- a sad, pathetic man.

Chronicling the full measure of the Bush administration's mendacity with 
regards to the war is a difficult task -- not because of a dearth of 
evidence for it but because of its so many layers, all its 
multidimensionality. It's almost like one of those Russian egg novelties 
in which each layer opened reveals another layer beneath it. Hard as it 
may be, in the interests of getting Mr. Bush past the phases of denial 
and anger, let's just hit on some of the main themes.

1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq 
maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was 
always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real 
fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the 
terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief 
advisors tried to leverage Americans' horror over 9/11 to gain support 
for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn 
to protect.

2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear 
weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches 
despite the fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried 
to prevent the president from doing so. What's the explanation for that? 
At best a reckless disregard for the truth in making the case war to the 
American public.

3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between 
chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American 
security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there 
was a strong consensus within the foreign policy establishmnet that Iraq 
continued to stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since 
Saddam had stockpiled and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had 
been free of on-site weapons inspections for almost four years. But what 
most observers meant by this was chemical and possibly biological 
weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference! The White House knew that 
this wasn't enough to get the country into war, so they pushed the 
threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much less 
evidence.

4. The fact that the administration's push for war wasn't even about WMD 
in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't get an email 
from a reader who writes, "I always knew that Saddam didn't have WMDs. 
How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn't know that 
too?" Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many 
things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question 
subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing 
between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor 
assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least 
the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and 
actually find out. That is what President Bush's very credible threat of 
force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began 
making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions 
about reconstituted WMD programs didn't bear out, the White House 
response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By 
early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear 
weapons effort underway -- the only sort of operation which could have 
represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the 
administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be 
started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They 
wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent 
information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It 
wasn't about WMD.

Beneath these top-line points of dishonesty, there were second order 
ones, to be sure -- claims that the entire war would cost a mere $50 
billion, insistence that the whole operation could be managed by only a 
fraction of the number of troops most experts believed it would take. Of 
course, these may be categorized as willful self-deceptions or gross 
irresponsibiity. And thus they are properly assigned to different 
sections of the Bush-Iraq Lies and Deceptions (BILD) bestiary than the 
cynical exploitation of lies and attempts to confuse proper.

In the president's new angle that his critics are trying to 'rewrite 
history', those critics might want to point out that his charge would be 
more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any 
independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the 
history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he's blowing 
into a fierce wind. The judgement of history hangs over this guy like a 
sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too.


-- Josh Marshall
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006989.php
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