From 2006 in an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson…
Bush declared that the greatest regret of his presidency was “the intelligence failure in Iraq.” But he claimed it was “hard… to speculate” as to whether or not he would make the same decision to invade with the correct information…”knowing what I know today, I would have still made that decision.”
“So, if you had had this — if the weapons had been out of the equation because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?” Fox News’ Brit Hume asked.
“Absolutely,” replied Bush
But on Tuesday night in a debate on Bush’s legacy, Karl Rove said…
“In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses,” but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. “Absent that, I suspect that the administration’s course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s.”
Obviously, these are contradictory claims and both cannot be true.
One possibility here – Rove is describing reality and Bush is, for reasons of personal emotional pathology, unable to admit error (there is some substantial evidence for this thesis). Alternately, Rove has it right and Bush is merely repeating a lie to his citizens about the motives for going to war for some assumed political advantage for him or his party (substantial evidence for this thesis as well).
But we already know so much about the circumstances and the decisions which precede this war from the UN weapons inspectors’ interactions with the Bush administration, from accounts by other governments in communication with the Bush administration pre-war and from documents which have subsequently come to light, from accounts by people working then at senior administration levels in the Bush government (O’Neil, Clarke, Powell, Armitage, etc), from accounts by reporters (Woodward particularly) of the runup, and from many other sources as well. We know from all of this that Rove’s claim above is designed to misrepresent and misinform.
Bush’s legacy is inextricable from this war. It is the defining aspect of his presidency. Any other factor comes in a distant second place . This recession/depression, whatever this nasty present situation is, will end and its complexity facilitates blaming others, however correctly or not. But the Iraq war was a ”pre-emptive” act entirely on the shoulders of Bush and his team. So this “legacy project” must now try to cast it or create a narrative about it which excuses. This isn’t a history project, it is a propaganda project. The history is:
- likely one million people now dead who were alive previously
- far more than that number maimed and multilated
- many more Americans dead than were killed in the 9/11 attack
- so many young American men and women maimed and mutilated
- enormous expenditures from the US treasury which have gone to corporate interests whose business is war and killing rather than to schools, to bridges, to manufacturing, to tech research, to hospitals, to alleviating poverty and suffering
- an enormous shift in military operations which placed logistics and combat activities into the hands of new, huge and powerful private corporations (Blackwater, etc) further incentising American militarism and removing much of American military and intelligence activities from the oversight of government and citizens
- further degredation of citizens’ trust in the honesty and transparency of their government
- the serious decline in how America is viewed by the rest of the world
- the serious evisceration of the mechanisms and the valuation of transparent governance
- serious and possibly long-term damage to the interests of the Republican Party
So, the likelihood that Rove, Karen Huges, Hadley, Bush, Kristol and everyone else involved in this propaganda campaign are going to be telling the truth is about zero. They are doing George Orwell. We ought not to let them.
Update: Eugene Robinson makes another important point regarding this attempt to rewrite history…
There’s another problem with the way Bush is trying to rewrite history. After U.S. forces combed Iraq for WMDs and established that none existed, the administration came up with other backdated rationales for the invasion. Vice President Cheney even kept insisting there was some link to Sept. 11 that only he could perceive; after a while, nobody paid him any attention.
Bush spoke of having liberated Iraqis from the savage rule of a tyrant — which is true, but that wasn’t the reason we were originally told we had to go to war. The president spoke of having created a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, one that would shoot out tendrils of freedom to take root throughout the region — which is a hard story to sell when the war’s greatest geopolitical impact has been to strengthen theocratic Iran to the point that it dares to dream of ancient Persian glory.
Bush pats himself on the back for keeping his eye on the ball — the “war against ideological thugs.” But those ideological thugs are ensconced somewhere, probably in the lawless frontier territories of Pakistan, rebuilding their murderous networks and plotting new attacks. I’m betting that they don’t regret Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, either. Robinson’s piece is here… http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120402859.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
-
