On one trip, he found himself sitting next to a vaguely-familiar man. It took him a while to recognize the fellow: it was Karl Rove!
Recognizing an important opportunity to make a professional plug, my friend made the case for increasing the sizes of university research grants.
Still, he couldn't help but wonder, what is Karl Rove thinking?
Yeah, what is Karl Rove thinking? Everyone wonders that. I do too.
I don't 'get' Rove's latest lament that he somehow served George Bush badly by not pushing back hard enough against the argument that George Bush lied us into war. He pushed back hard then, and he's pushing back hard now. So why doesn't the push-back work? Because it's pretty-much false!
There are big differences in the forms of WMD: biological, chemical, nuclear arms. As a practical matter, for strategic, debilitating attacks between nations, only nuclear arms really matter. The scale is so different between nuclear weapons, and all other WMD, that nuclear weapons stand alone in their own category.
I believe that U.S. intelligence was good enough in 2003 to assess that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons available for use. If he did have such weapons, the invasion would never have been permitted to proceed. Because it is way too dangerous to attack a nuclear power, period! The risks are too high! So Cheney and friends knew, for sure, that Saddam couldn't hit the USA. That intelligence understanding was too hot for Congress, however. It may be that this is the major lie of the buildup to the 2003 war: silence, when you know the actual truth! So, you justify war by conflating the forms of WMD, to create a sense of imminent risk, knowing all along that the real risks are actually pretty small. A nice game!
I think the Bush Administration was genuinely surprised to discover that Saddam's chemical and biological weapons didn't exist after all. Saddam was bluffing, to keep the Kurds, the Iranians, the Shiites, and the Americans off balance. Just amazing! The intelligence was there to judge that the other WMD was absent, however, but no one wanted to come to that judgment: the decision to wage war had long ago been made.
But for Rove to think that he had somehow neutered Democratic opposition because they had taken one highly-pressured vote with the Administration is truly strange. The Administration controlled the intelligence the Congress was receiving. The intelligence was not just a little wrong, but dramatically, terribly wrong. Is it a serious misjudgement to conclude that one has been lied to under these circumstances? I don't think so! There is nothing hypocritical or cynical about it at all! Rove sounds a bit injured about having his integrity doubted, but there's so much to doubt!
Is Rove trying to argue that Bush didn't lie, because Bush knew the truth about Saddam's lack of nuclear WMD, but held his tongue from Congress and the American people, so it wasn't technically a lie? That would be so like the Karl Rove that liberals love to hate! What's the right adjective? Positively Clintonian! Sometimes there are lies, and sometimes there are misjudgments, and often there are misperceptions. It's going to take a while to sort it all out, particularly since so much of the actual information is still classified. Nevertheless, blame for it all - serious blame - came to rest, right where it should, right on top of the Bushies. Bush lied; people died:
Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush's integrity. "All the evidence points to the conclusion," Kennedy said, that the Bush administration "put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth." Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed "to be forthcoming" about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.
The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, "It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth." Mr. Edwards chimed in, "The administration has a problem with the truth."
The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn't keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war.
...Then there was Al Gore, who charged on June 24, 2004, that Mr. Bush spent "prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies" and accused him of treason, bellowing that Mr. Bush "betrayed his country." Yet just a month before the war resolution debate, the former vice president said, "We know that [Saddam] has stored away secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
...The damage extended beyond Mr. Bush's presidency. The attacks on Mr. Bush poisoned America's political discourse. Saying the commander-in-chief intentionally lied America into war is about the most serious accusation that can be leveled at a president. The charge was false—and it opened the way for politicians in both parties to move the debate from differences over issues into ad hominem attacks.
At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his administration's heart. What Democrats started seven years ago left us less united as a nation to confront foreign challenges and overcome America's enemies.
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