Did Bush mislead the country into war?
A MUST-READ POST BY KEVIN DRUM AT POLITICAL ANIMAL:
Kevin provides "a list of five key dissents about administration claims, all of which were circulated before the war but kept under wraps until after the war".
His conclusion:
I provide a lot of links here at The Reaction, but this one's particularly important given Bush's 11/11 speech and the current discussion of "revisionism". Plus, scroll down through all the comments, currently numbering over 300. Feel free to agree or disagree with Kevin's thesis in the comments section to this post, or otherwise to add your own views on whether Bush misled the country into war. I'm interested to know what you all think.
Did the Bush administration mislead the country during the runup to the Iraq war? It's true that they turned out to be wrong about a great many things, but that doesn't answer the question. It merely begs it. Were they sincerely wrong, or did they intentionally manipulate the intelligence they presented to the public in order to mask known weaknesses in their case?
Kevin provides "a list of five key dissents about administration claims, all of which were circulated before the war but kept under wraps until after the war".
His conclusion:
It would have been perfectly reasonable for the White House to present all the evidence pro and con and then use that evidence to make the strongest possible case for war. But that's not what they did. Instead, they suppressed any evidence that might have thrown doubt on their arguments, making it impossible for the public to evaluate what they were saying...
This is not the way to market a war. It's certainly not the way to market a war that requires long term support from citizens in a democracy. But that's how they marketed it anyway.
I provide a lot of links here at The Reaction, but this one's particularly important given Bush's 11/11 speech and the current discussion of "revisionism". Plus, scroll down through all the comments, currently numbering over 300. Feel free to agree or disagree with Kevin's thesis in the comments section to this post, or otherwise to add your own views on whether Bush misled the country into war. I'm interested to know what you all think.
posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at
1:31 AM
1 Comments:
I think you've hit on the problem, Nate. Yes, many Democrats (about 100 in Congress, I believe) went along with Republicans to give the president the authority to go to war, but they did so without all the intelligence (just what the Administration was letting them see), with the 2002 elections just a month away, and the memory of 9/11 still fresh in everyone's mind. Some, like Feingold, were able to withstand the pressure, but it's hardly surprising that many Democrats went along with Bush. At the time, after all, opposing the war resolution looked like a lack of patriotism.
Regardless of whather or not the Bush Administration actually lied (or whether it sincerely believed its own spin), what is appalling is that the U.S. went into war in such a way. I supported the war, but only after all other options had been taken off the table. In other words, I supported it because it was inevitable, because I believed (from what I knew at the time) that Saddam had or was looking to acquire WMDs, because I thought there was a moral case to remove a brutal tyrant, and because I thought (and here I was really, really wrong) that the Bush Administration knew what it was doing and that it would follow up the war with a concerted effort to rebuild Iraq properly. Needless to say, that hasn't happened.
And now it looks like Bush is looking for a way out of his own mess, leaving Iraq in a serious mess of its own.
Truly a disaster.
By
Michael J.W. Stickings, at 5:25 PM
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