A Lefty That Says 'Bush never lied to us about Iraq'
By Warner Todd Huston Posted in War — Comments (41) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
James Kirchick, assistant editor of The New Republic, has come under my scrutiny for his bias before, of course. I see one of my roles as keeping an eye on the bias in the media and to document and analyze that bias. But while I naturally focus on when the media get it wrong, I also like to point out when those who I’ve criticized get it right. Here is a case when a member of the media that I usually criticize did, indeed, get it right and this time it might get him in Dutch with his lefty pals in the nutroots. After all, the surest way to get the nutroots upset at you is to say Bush did not lie about the war. But that is exactly what Kirchick just did and he did an admirable job chronicling it, too.
In an editorial in the L.A. Times on the 16th, Kirchick said that "Bush never lied to us about Iraq" and then went on to substantiate his claim in a style that runs contrary to the Media and nutroots meme that "Bush lied and people died."
Read on . . .
Kirchick started his piece with a recounting of the flip flop that Mitt Romney's father, George, undertook when he reversed his support of the Vietnam war as he geared up to run for president in 1968. Romney initially supported the Vietnam War but later claimed that the administration and war supporters "brainwashed" him into believing in the war. With his flip flop he claimed that he had seen the light, but critics said that he was merely playing to a perceived anti-war changing tide and trying to capture that vote -- in other words, Romney's flip flop was only calculated to get votes. This, Kirchick says, is the same thing that politicians like John F. Kerry have done with the Iraq war. They voted for it before they voted against it.
The left narrative, one the media is happy to parrot, has been that Bush lied us into war. Kirchick points out that "the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war."
But Kirchick then steps out into some of the most intellectually honest analysis I've seen from the left since before the 2000 election when BDS first began to infect the media.
Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House "manipulation" -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
Kirchick goes on to chronicle some of the agencies and investigative bodies that have found absolutely no evidence that the Bush Administration manipulated Congress as it made the case for the war.
Kirchick also comes as close to calling John D. Rockefeller (D, W. Va.) a liar as you can without using those specific words when he notes that Rockefeller's "highly partisan" Senate Intelligence Committee report does not support the wild eyed claims made in its summation.
Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.
Kirchick also trenchantly notes that the latest partisan attack that is being presented as a "report" conveniently forgets to mention the words of the many dozens of highly placed Democrats who's words were nearly identical to Bush's in the run up to war.
In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month's report, titled "Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information," includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.
In the end, Kirchick finds no shred of proof that Bush "lied" about anything. In fact, he scolds every Democrat and partisan leftist for saying that he did and that the claim that Bush lied us into war is an "unsubstantiated allegation" that is "cowardly and dishonest."
So, kudos to James Kirchick for an honest look at the record. Certainly we can agree to disagree right now, at this point, if the war was a good idea or not. But, it is beyond question that there were no lies disseminated by the Bush Administration and neither did the president "manipulate" any evidence to "mislead" the nation into war.
Go read Kirchick's piece and marvel that it came from a lefty. He really nailed it. "Bush never lied to us about Iraq" is worth your time.
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For years the MSM has let these lies fester and poison public opinion. With their access to audio, video and print records this should have been a fait accompli long ago.
Now as their chosen party tries to gain middle ground (and LAT, readers) they shed some old lies. Frankly, that smells like an electoral strategy which casts off vocal far left groups well out of tune with our countries majority for less extreme voters.
I applaud the effort but question motive until this becomes a consistent, deliberate pursuit of the truth.
"Nec Aspera Terrent"
bene ambula et redambula
Contributor to The Minority Report
For the life of me, I don't understand why the administration hasn't taken a more proactive position on challenging this idiotic assertion. I know that GWB has stated at least once that the only person who manipulated pre-war intelligence was Saddam Hussein, but he, every member of the administration, and every Republican member of congress should have been spending the last 6 years shouting it from the rooftops.
______________________________________
"You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice" - Scott Adams (speaking through Dogbert)
That the Bush administration was focused heavily on "disciplining the message", and when a lower-level member would attempt to speak up and discuss more detailed defenses of the administration's position, the administration would slap them down and tell them to just repeat what Bush said. Feith is of the opinion that this was a mistake and much different than how Reagan used to handle things like this. His (Feith's) feeling is that the president speaks in generalities out of necessity, and that you really need lower level people to refute the more detailed attacks. Now that would require a high level of coordination, essentially you'd have to keep discipline with many more tentacles stretching out there, but it would be possible.
Feith is the author of War and Decision (sure everyone here knows that already), and although I haven't gotten to his book yet (I have it, I'm just finishing up Steyn's America Alone at the moment), I have heard him speak numerous times about it.
when a collection of people diverse as Franks, Powell, Rice and Hayden question a persons actions, it's time to listen.
In numerous cases Feith operated well outside his duties at OSD, exempli gratia - going so far as to independently open discussions with Iranian opposition members. When did DoS relinquish that responsibility?
His actions were both inconsistent, desultory and only sustained in the sense of ideology. That is not only bad government, but a dangerous abbrogation of power and abandonement of responsibility.
Frankly, if the President were to speak in more detail according to Feith's opines and assertions we would be standing much deeper in the pool of fallacy and purported motive.
Only the President can speak for himself and hence the necessary discipline of message. I prefer that approach any day to Feith attempting extemporaneous reasoning based on personal proclivities.
There are many spokes on the wheel, but only one place where rubber meets the road. Unfortunately, that is a metaphor Feith will probably never understand.
"Nec Aspera Terrent"
bene ambula et redambula
Contributor to The Minority Report
Franks, Powell, Rice and Hayden are some sort of infallible collective?
Powell and Rice have used the State Department repeatedly to undermine the president's intended policies. And it took Franks a long time to get up to speed on Rumsfeld's desire to avoid an "up the middle" war fighting plan borrowed from NATO tank doctrine.
And the CIA hasn't exactly been a model of analytical probity for about, let's see, 30-odd years.
Feith's book makes a lot of points that are inconvenient to the self-styled reputations of people like Powell and Rice. And Franks always has looked for a scapegoat to explain away the fact that Rumsfeld took him to the woodshed a few times.
Post-war pacification was the big US failure in Iraq and Feith argues that the long occupation under Bremer was the cause. Feith also points out that Afganistan did better without an occupation and a quick transition to local rule. Moreover, most of the "exiles" identified for the potential provisional government are now running Iraq. So Feith's critique of the need for an American occupation in Iraq is not so easily dismissed.
My bet is that Feith's reputation will bear up better under the scrutiny of historical examination than will the great and the good mentioned here.
While I agree that Kirchick's article was a long-overdue corrective, it does not answer the question of where the intelligence estimates came from in the first place, or whether the conclusions stated there were influenced by those with a political agenda.
For example, Bush stated, based on intelligence estimates, that Iraq had both weapons of mass destruction and the facilities to make more. Kirchick is right that Bush did not lie if he relied on the intelligence estimates. The UN inspectors led by Hans Blix, however, had concluded otherwise. As it turned out, Blix was right and the CIA was wrong. Why was the UN inspection teams' information ignored? Why did Bush and Cheney unequivocally state that Iraq had WMDs when the UN reports said otherwise ?
Bush and Cheney do not like or trust the UN. But ... at what point does willfull ignorance become a form of dishonesty equivalent to telling lies?
Kirchick is obviously an honest man with integrity. I am not yt persuaded that Bush (and even more so Cheney) deserve equal admiration.
They ignored the UN inspectors because as usual with UN operations they accomplished very little. Every time they tried to inspect a facility, they were denied access for weeks, basically enough time to clean up or move operations. Iraq played this game with the UN for months before Hans finally decided they must not have any weapons because he couldn't find them. I'm sure the CIA had people who knew things in places we couldn't imagine.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his."
-General George S. Patton
"Why did Bush and Cheney unequivocally state that Iraq had WMDs when the UN reports said otherwise ?"
1. Because the United States doesn't rely upon the U.N. for intelligence.
2. Because pretty much every one of our allies' intelligence agencies said the same thing.
3. For the same reason so many sentators did.
"at what point does willfull ignorance become a form of dishonesty equivalent to telling lies"
First you would have to find some proof that they were "willfully ignorant" instead of simply misinformed just like Congress and our allies were. France and Germany both believed that Iraq had WMDs too, they just didn't think that it was worth going to war over.
It's telling that the anti-Bush crowd focuses all of their attention on Bush's pre-war statements and question his motivations while leaving Congress out of it, like many of them didn't say the exact same things that Bush did after seeing the exact same information. They don't even go after Republican congressmen who voted for the war becasue they know that if they did that it would implicate every lawmaker who was for the war, even their own.
How's that for " willfull ignorance become a form of dishonesty equivalent to telling lies?"
... and you have volumes of intelligence information dating from more than a decade and up until the present day gathered by your multi-billion dollar intelligence agencies of which the overwhelming majority of their analysts conclude "X."
Furthermore, your counterparts in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, etc. also tell you that their multi-billion dollar intelligence agencies have also come to the same "X" conclusion from information they've been gathering for over the same period of time.
Then, you have the UN, who conduct a highly public 3 month inspection of a nation the size of California which involved giving notice to the target well in advance of where the inspection teams would be going to inspect next. And you know that if Saddam were truly determined to hide the weapons there was a very slim chance of Blix's team finding them.
Furthermore, Saddam not only is refusing to submit documentation substantiating his claims of having destroyed his weapons, he is also refusing to point to the sites where these weapons were supposedly destroyed for forensic analysis to confirm the veracity of his claims. You're also aware that he once declared himself free of WMD only to have his son-in-law defect and expose the existence of continuing weapons development programs.
You have a choice, and note that lives are on the line either way (imagine a suicide killer with a thermos sized canister of VX from Iraq - which Clinton claimed that Saddam had at least 20,000 liters unaccounted for - in the middle of Times Square) Remember that you have no access to hindsight before the decision is made and note that as President you cannot dismiss such terrible scenarios as too fantastic to deal with - after all, whoever really thought that terrorists would really hijack four planes and crash them into buildings in the middle of a city before it actually happened on 9/11?
Now then, who do you trust? Hans Blix and his crew ... or the 15 or 16 agencies that make up the United States Intelligence community as well as those of the UK, France, Germany, etc.?
"First you win the argument, then you win the vote." - MARGARET THATCHER.
So let's start winning the argument.
Of course Bush didn't lie leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Even Jay Rockefeller knows this.
Scott Thomas Beauchamp and Frankie Foer lied.
Gee, a report with a summary that carries conclusions that aren't justified by the body of the report...where have I heard that happen before?
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"You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice" - Scott Adams (speaking through Dogbert)
After the invasion, when we went looking for the the WMDs, we found .... nothing. No WMDs, no facilities for making them, no evidence there had ever been WMDs. Yes, Saddam Hussein did his best to obstruct the UN inspectors, but if the CIA had, in your phrase "people who knew things in places we couldn't imagine", why did it turn out that Blix was right and the CIA wrong?
If Kirchick is right and Bush / Cheney did not lie because they relied on intelligence estimates, then one of two things must be true. Either: (1) the US intelligence agencies are incompetent, or (2) the intelligence agencies told Bush and Cheney what they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth, in which case they are dishonest.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidty.
RM217
I believe that your first proposition has been proven correct. The US intelligence agencies were incompetent. If they weren't, they might have prevented the destruction of the Twin Towers. They had been hobbled by layers and layers of red-tape and regulations and a post-Cold War/pre-9/11 mindset.
1. Use the Reply to This button. It is an intelligence test for our lefty friends. We await your test results. [I would find it quickly. Moe has an itchy trigger finger today.]
2. Would you define mustard gas as a weapon of mass destruction? If not, why? [You see, we know that S.H. used mustard gas on the Kurds. Or did they forget to tell you that in school.]
Now also found at The Minority Report
At one time Saddam had WMD. What was found after Desert Storm was recorded by UN inspectors and Saddam was ordered to destroy it.
Blix could not say with certainty that Iraq had no WMD because he never had unfettered access and Iraq didn't have proper documentation showing the final disposition of known WMD.
Over and over the UN gave Saddam the choice between allowing unfettered access and "or else". He always chose "or else".
After 9/11, there were signs of growing contact between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda and WMD is a bad mix.
Saddam was given one last chance and again chose "or else".
Saddam finally got the "or else" he kept asking for. Bush got to go after a very annoying and potentially dangerous thorn.
Sounds like a win-win solution to me.
And somewhere in the mind of the Iranian leaders is the thought that "or else" might come knocking if they push too hard.
samcoastie
When I posted this on a left-leaning forum I visit, I was insulted as being stupid. They couldn't attack the L.A. Times or the writer of the op-ed, so they attack me.
Typical liberal tactic.
In what universe? He's a protege of Marty Peretz, which means he supports Israel first and foremost, and by extension, the Iraq campaign. He's a Neo-con, and has been for years.
Oh, he's also gay, which may explain why some assume he's left-wing. Think of Andrew Sullivan before he turned against Bush. That's Kirchick.
... does that falsify his article's premise that Bush did not lie?
PS: Kirchick is a Leftist in this Universe. Just because he disagrees with the average Kossack on one out of a hundred issues does not boot him over to our side of the fence.
"First you win the argument, then you win the vote." - MARGARET THATCHER.
So let's start winning the argument.
Or go over to New Republic and check the archives. This is nothing new. It's not as though Kirchick woke up yesterday, slapped his forehead, and said "Wow, all this time, I've had it all wrong." He's been taking the Neo-Con position on Iraq for years, and with this LA Times article, Kirchick is defending not only Bush but himself. I fail to see anything noteworthy about that.
Second, that still doesn't make him not a person of the Left.
Third, Kirchick is correct and its on record.
Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, Anthony Zinni, Sandy Berger, Jay Rockefeller, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, etc. all said the exact same things Bush said about Saddam, WMD and terrorism even before Bush took the oath of office in 2001.
I guess that makes them all "neo-cons."
"First you win the argument, then you win the vote." - MARGARET THATCHER.
So let's start winning the argument.
"Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, Anthony Zinni, Sandy Berger, Jay Rockefeller, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, etc. all said the exact same things Bush said about Saddam, WMD and terrorism even before Bush took the oath of office in 2001."
And which one of these people launched a ground forces invasion and occupation of Iraq?
If you're going to invade another country, topple the government and become responsible for its security, infrastructure, economic development, etc., you better be damn sure the intelligence you're justifying the invasion upon is 100% accurate.
"Second, that still doesn't make him not a person of the Left."
Virtually all he ever writes about is Iraq and the Middle East, and on those topics he is clearly on the right. You have barely heard of the guy, and I've been reading him for years. Why do you keep trying to tell me he is a leftist?
And which one of these people launched a ground forces invasion and occupation of Iraq?
So you're conceding that Bush did not, in fact, lie.
Good.
PS: I find it amusing that you are somehow aware of my state of knowledge with regard to Kirchick.
"First you win the argument, then you win the vote." - MARGARET THATCHER.
So let's start winning the argument.
those people you mentioned were right...just did not have the guts to follow through... Typical of the left.
Formally known as Deagle... "Golf is a way of life..."
or simply a gay(and welcome) NeoCon.
I don't know how many of his other positions have evolved but his defense of the Iraq War has been consistent from the beginning.
Kirchik has always been pretty good at attacking hypocrisy so even as a NeoCon he's had plenty of disputes with his fellow conservatives.
"So you're conceding that Bush did not, in fact, lie.
Good."
I never said he did. The only point I responded to was the notion that Jamie Kirchick is a leftist. But since you asked, I think you could make a pretty strong case that he lied by omission, not telling the American people that the evidence of Saddam possessing or developing WMDs was pretty weak. I suppose you could make the argument that he was to dimwitted or too partisan to understand just how weak the case for WMDs was prior to the invasion. I would guess the latter, because his instincts were correct when Tenet presented the evidence and Bush said, "Is that all there is?" But Tenet responded with "it's a slam dunk", and Bush let it slide without demanding better evidence.
Cheney, on the other hand, just flat out lied:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." VFW speech, August, 2002.
"PS: I find it amusing that you are somehow aware of my state of knowledge with regard to Kirchick."
A reasonable assumption. Unless you have a paid subscription to the New Republic, it's doubtful that you've read much by him. He doesn't get published in too many other places.
You're flunking it.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!
that there were weapons of mass destruction makes what Cheney says a lie....but when the same idiot Tenet supposedly tells Clinton there is a biological weapons factory in the Sudan and he bombs that Clinton is not lying? or do your liars have to be Republicans? and with regards to assumptions they make an ass out of you only.
Freedom of Religion NOT Freedom from Religion
Unintelligble. Revise and resubmit.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!
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Now I'm not so sure it couldn't be a machine. More manaical laughter.
The free exchange of ideas inevitably yields both heat and light.
(Not speaking for Moe, of course.)
My dead white cat has a higher IQ, more cognitive reasoning ability and way more common sense than you do.
Hope that clears it up for you.
____
CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
So you "banned" me. How infantile. Just because I made some arguments that hurt your little ears. You're as bad as your partners in censorship, the Kos people. All you ideologues can’t handle a real discussion, you just want a place safe and warm where you can coo at each other.
See ya, little boys. Stay away from the grownups until you grow a pair. You're obviously not ready.
...if only she had figured out how to thread comments in the meantime.
Ach, well.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!
We're just allergic to stupidity. So you had to go.
The Unofficial RedState FAQ
“You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say. ” - Martin Luther
in the MSM was honest and after the shock wore off I was grateful for their honesty....you must call them out when they lie and you must give notice when they tell the truth....rare as that is :-)
Freedom of Religion NOT Freedom from Religion