[Mb-civic] Another Set of Scare Tactics - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Another Set of Scare Tactics

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; Page A21

Mr. President, it won't work this time.

With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent of Americans 
agreeing that George W. Bush "deliberately misled people to make the 
case for war with Iraq," the president clearly needs to tend to his 
credibility problems. But his partisan attacks on the administration's 
critics, in a Veterans Day speech last week and in Alaska yesterday, 
will only add to his troubles.

Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of 
having "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" was 
giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "These baseless attacks send the 
wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's 
will," Bush declared last week. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy 
determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their 
elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind 
them."

You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie 
Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our troops and our 
enemy by daring to seek the indictment of Scooter Libby on a charge of 
perjury and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our 
troops desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the 
administration?

There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the 
administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about 
the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade 
Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate 
into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he 
doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do 
all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them 
should have raised.

The big difference between our current president and his father is that 
the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War 
until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most 
substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, 
and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about 
keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.

The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a 
vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.

Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is no dove, warned of rushing 
"pell-mell" into an endorsement of broad war powers for the president. 
The Los Angeles Times reported that Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois 
Democrat, protested in September: "We're being asked to go to war, and 
vote on it in a matter of days. We need an intelligence estimate before 
we can seriously vote." And Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, put 
it plainly: "This will be one of the most important decisions Congress 
makes in a number of years; I do not believe it should be made in the 
frenzy of an election year." But it was.

Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap partisan attacks. In 
New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against 
Democrat John Arthur Smith declaring: "While Smith 'reflects' on the 
situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city 
still remains." Note that Smith wasn't being attacked for opposing the 
war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even 
think before going to war.

Marc Racicot, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, said 
about the late Sen. Paul Wellstone's opposition to the war resolution: 
"He has set about to diminish the capacity of this nation to defend 
itself. That is a legitimate issue." Wellstone, who died in a plane 
crash a few days before the election, was not intimidated. But other 
Democrats were.

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say 
that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who 
"voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up 
their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he 
does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place 
under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and 
debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to 
charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.

By linking the war on terrorism to a partisan war against Democrats, 
Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by 
resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded us of 
the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/14/AR2005111401018.html
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