Rewriting History
By Callimachus | Related entries in Foreign Policy, General Politics, In The News, The War On TerrorismI was going to try to tie together some thoughts on the current state of the politicized anti-Iraq War faction — i.e. the Democratic leaders who are still rewriting 2002 rather than trying to write 2008.
But I see John Cole has already pulled it together nicely. He touches base on the recent powerful Fred Hiatt column in the WaPo, which Denise Best picked up on below:
What Lieberman doesn’t say is that many Democrats would view such an outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further undercut President Bush, and Bush’s war, without taking the risk of offering an alternative strategy�to satisfy their withdraw-now constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position.
Many of them understand that dwindling public support could force the United States into a self-defeating position, and that defeat in Iraq would be disastrous for the United States as well as for Mahdi and his countrymen. But the taste of political blood as Bush weakens, combined with their embarrassment at having supported the war in the first place, seems to override that understanding.
And he notes the bombastic reaction to this particular piece.
Note to John, and many other bloggers: pay attention to the print media distinction between an “article,” a “column,” and an “editorial” (he confuses the last two in his post). They mean very different things and the distinction matters. A newspaper may run a column with which it utterly disagrees, but an editorial represents the official opinion of the newspaper, and almost never carries a byline.
And he touches base on the ugly squirming of Sen. Rockefeller:
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: … Now, the intelligence that they had and the intelligence that we had were probably different. We didn’t get the Presidential Daily Briefs. We got only a finished product, a finished product, a consensual view of the intelligence community, which does not allow for agencies like in the case of the aluminum tubes, the Department of Energy said these aren’t thick enough to handle nuclear power. They left that out and went ahead with they have aluminum tubes and they’re going to develop nuclear power.
WALLACE: Senator, you’re quite right. You didn’t get the Presidential Daily Brief or the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. You got the National Intelligence Estimate. But the Silberman Commission, a Presidential commission that looked into this, did get copies of those briefs, and they say that they were, if anything, even more alarmist, even less nuanced than the intelligence you saw, and yet you, not the President, said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. …
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Chris, there’s always the same conversation. You know it was not the Congress that sent 135,000 or 150,000 troops.
WALLACE: But you voted, sir, and aren’t you responsible for your vote?
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: No.
WALLACE: You’re not?
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: No. I’m responsible for my vote, but I’d appreciate it if you’d get serious about this subject, with all due respect. We authorized him to continue working with the United Nations, and then if that failed, authorized him to use force to enforce the sanctions. We did not send 150,000 troops or 135,000 troops. It was his decision made probably two days after 9/11 that he was going to invade Iraq. That we did not have a part of, and, yes, we had bad intelligence, and when we learned about it, I went down to the floor and said I would never have voted for this thing.
WALLACE: My only point sir, and I am trying to be serious about it, is as I understand Phase Two, the question is based on the intelligence you had, what were the statements you made? You had the National Intelligence Estimate which expressed doubts about Saddam’s nuclear program, and yet you said he had a nuclear program. The President did the same thing.
Wow. That’s what I mean by “rewriting history.” Everything Bush screwed up trying to solve was, by definition, never a problem. Just like we saw here recently: Bush’s bad information on Saddam trying to get uranium from Niger = Saddam never tried to get uranium from Niger. No, that’s not true. That’s rewriting history.
As Capt. Ed comments, after reporting the Rockefeller prose pretzel:
This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 and is filed under Foreign Policy, General Politics, In The News, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.This is the conundrum in which the Democrats have stuck themselves. They want to put all of the rhetoric on Bush on determining that Iraq presented a long-term threat to the US. Bush carefully avoided using the term “imminent”; indeed, he argued against waiting for threats to become imminent, post-9/11, as that would put Americans in danger of surprise attacks just as we had experienced. Saddam’s development of portable WMD would have found terrorist hands eventually, which is why Bush proposed military action before the threat reached that stage. Rockefeller instead used the “imminent” term and now wants to shove it off onto George Bush.
At the time, the Democrats did not want to give the Republicans an edge on national security, with the first national elections since 9/11 coming in four weeks. Democrats wanted to look tough and use tough rhetoric. Only after the election (where they lost the Senate) did they start ankle-biting their vote — even after George Bush allowed the UN to restart the useless UNSCOM weapons inspections and waited five months to take the military action that Congress authorized.
How empty are the Democrats of ideas and long-term plans for national security? Three years later, they’re still lying about their own statements on national TV to smear George Bush — even though he can’t run for election again! Rockefeller shows how lame this meme has become. It should embarrass every Democrat in the country and start a demand for new party leadership. Unfortunately, it won’t, but it may finally convince the rational moderates that the Democrats have led the party over a cliff.
November 14th, 2005 at 6:21 pm
Cal,
OK. I was going to drop this, but I have to point out that your comment in “When Neo-Cons Attack” saying that “Saddam did seek uranium from Niger” isn’t necessarily correct.
The US Senate Intelligence Committee “makes clear that US intelligence experts have come to doubt whether Iraq was even trying to buy the stuff.”
http://www.factcheck.org/article222.html
Hence, I wasn’t willing to concede that he did try to buy uranium and I made what you termed “my non-admission admission that I was wrong.” I was wrong to make the blanket assertion that he did not try to buy uranium, but I was still not willing to go full circle and concede your equally suspect assertion that he did seek it.
If I am a “revisionist,” then I am not the only one.
November 14th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
I am not a revisionist. It is ridiculous to pretend that we (pro-war Dems) authorized force but not an actual war. Anyone who didn’t understand that Bush intended to go to war simply wasn’t paying attention.
The valid complaint on Bush and intel is not that he lied, but that he lacked the experience, the curiosity, the honesty to question more deeply, to demand a fuller explanation, and to listen to dissenting voices. It’s less what he did than what he failed to do. Bush simply has no bullshit detector. He has no desire to grow a bullshit detector. He knows the answer he wants, and surprise surprise, he gets it.
November 14th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
I am an independent and I supported the deposing of Saddam and I continue to support our efforts. I could justify my support soley on the statements of Democrats: Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright provide me with all the info I need to support running Saddam out of town. Not to mention all the other Democrats who when a Democrat was in the White House apparently had a much clearer view of reality. Tony Blair, who is definitely a man of the left, provided an opportunity for American liberals who hated Bush to support the deposing of Saddam and the promotion of liberal democracy, but it turned out that they hated Bush more than Saddam or Bin Laden and so they passed on the opportunity. As an independent I want both parties to be aggressive on nat’l security. I’m willing to vote for a Democrat, but not an anti-war leftist.
November 14th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
Phil:
I think the problem here is that we are quite likely to lose this war. That’s why there’s so much tension, so much anger, so much conflict between factions. If we were winning the situation would be very different. We are in the middle of the time honored process of finding a scapegoat. When you’re winning no one needs a scapegoat. In Germany 1945 they were looking for scapegoats, while we, of course, were not.
The Dems want to wash their hands of any blame. They want to have a shot at exploiting the war politically. They are craven, dishonest and opportunistic. But their guilt is minor compared to Mr. Bush’s. He was given a free hand and he made a mess of it. If you were parceling guilt out in the crudest possible terms you might say that Dems are responsible for 200 of our dead, and the President the remaining 1800.
November 14th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
Socks,
Your FactCheck-linbked quote is, in full, “None of the new information suggests Iraq ever nailed down a deal to buy uranium, and the Senate report makes clear that US intelligence analysts have come to doubt whether Iraq was even trying to buy the stuff.”
This is an odd reading of a single paragraph of page 71 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, describing a single June 17, 2003, CIA memo for the DCI. The committee noted, “This memorandum was not distributed outside the CIA and the Committee has not been provided with any intelligence products in which the CIA published its corrected assessment on Iraq’s pursuit of uranium from Niger outside of the agency.”
In their conclusions in that section, the report’s authors wrote (#20):
Since the committee’s purpose was to investigate the intelligence process, not the truth of the uranium claims, it didn’t bother to not, even obiter dictum, whether the claim was right. It merely noted the confusion in the U.S. spy agency. The Lord Butler report, and other assessments, make it clear there was a high probability Saddam was probing Niger as a source of uranium. The European spy agencies, especially the French, had the goods on that.
Of course, maybe he wanted it for a recipe or something.
If you want to make that the basis for asserting Saddam never approached Niger about uranium, be my guest.
Heck, it’s quite possible that when Saddam went to great and convoluted lengths to open up trade talks with the Niger government, he was interested in the 20 percent or so of Niger’s trade that isn’t uranium, which, as I understand it, mostly consists of cows and goats that wander across the border into Mali.
November 14th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Thanks for the non-admission admission that you were wrong.
And you’re still a weakling for blatantly avoiding the issue that I brought up, even after I had corrected myself.
November 14th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
Socks,
Please forgive my weaklingness. I can only read what you write. I can only answer you on what you’ve written. I can’t avoid what you’re not saying. What issue did you bring up in your comment, other than that you think you’re right and I’m wrong, that you think I’m “avoiding”?
November 14th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
What relevance does Joseph Wilson’s or Valerie Plame’s credibility have to any current issue? Why do people like you insist on continuing to attack them?
November 14th, 2005 at 9:06 pm
I would be perfectly happy if Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame disappeared from the national dialogue and once again attained the obscurity they feel so violated for being deprived of.
I was done with them ages ago. But the relentless attackers of the American effort in Iraq keep bringing them back as part of the effort to rewrite history and prove “Bush lied.” (Wilson and Plame seem to abet or at least accept this role).
So, they’re still part of the game, and the unpleasant business of reminding people that Wilson has some credibility problems necessarily has to continue.
I’m all in favor of Fitzgerald’s work, by the way, and getting out the facts of who leaked her name and determining if anyone ought to be prosecuted for that. If it cleans Rove and Cheney out of the White House, so much the better — but that’s a political judgement on my part.
On the other hand, as a professional journalist, this business of prosecuting leakers strikes me as one that might have as-yet-unforeseen consequences, which many of the most gung-ho Bush-bashers may live to rue.
Now, let’s see if it’s possible for you to write a comment to me that doesn’t include a personal insult or a “people-like-you” blanket smear, or whether I should add you to the list of online people I happily ignore.
November 14th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
OK.
The single alleged sale of uranium that Wilson investigated was proven to be a fraud. That’s over and no longer in dispute. The Fitzgerald case does not depend on Wilson or Plame’s credibility. I don’t know why any anti-Bush person would need Wilson or Plame to prove “Bush Lied” or anything else at this point. I agree that they should disappear, but I am amazed to see how often the pro-war crowd still attacks them as straw men. Right now they only serve as lightening rods for pro-war pundits.
You can ignore me if you want. I won’t lose any sleep. But the quality of this blog would greatly suffer, though, of course.
November 14th, 2005 at 10:07 pm
A straw man is an argument you want your opponent to make, but not an argument he really made. Do you say the left never used Plame/Wilson to attack Bush?
I’d also dispute the notion that the anti-war faction has moved on from Wilson. I just did a Technorati search for “Wilson Plame.” The first hit on the first page came up with “Loaded Mouth” (a member of the “Progressive Blog Alliance”). The rest of the page consisted primarily of anti-war/anti-Bush blogs: Plame Game, Newsroom, Genius of Insanity, Building a Better World, Groovemachine, Shimmy’s Blog, True Blue Liberal, Discussion about 9/11.
The search also hauled up six blogs I’d identify as “not anti-war or anti-Bush.” That’s a three-to-two ratio of blue to red.
What hubris.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:45 am
Cal-
How come every time someone counters your argument, you threaten to ignore them? Socks was making a valid counter to your argument that Saddam, regardless of how much evidence to the contrary, tried to obtain Uranium from Niger. In your insistence to prove that he had, you can come up only with a weak argument that all the evidence against his acquistions are only singularities and not disproving that there may have been other opportunities for Saddam to have aquired uranium. And your proof for Saddam having aquired it? The Lord Butler Report.
“The purpose of the visit was not immediately known. But uranium ore accounts for almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports. Putting this together with past Iraqi purchases of uranium ore from Niger, the limitations faced by the Iraq regime on access to indigenous
uranium ore and other evidence of Iraq seeking to restart its nuclear programme, the JIC judged that Iraqi purchase of uranium ore could have been the subject of discussions and noted in an assessment in December 2000 that:
. . . unconfirmed intelligence indicates Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium. [JIC, 1 December 2000]”
This is hardly conclusive, and speculative at best. You can’t expect those against your argument to put up conclusive evidence that Saddam did not try to buy Uranium from Niger when you can not show conclusively that he did. It is an illogical argument to make.
Your assumption that you must be right because you have non-conclusive pressumptive evidence is the real Hubris.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:46 am
Or am I still iggied?
November 15th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Socks,
“The single alleged sale of uranium that Wilson investigated was proven to be a fraud. That’s over and no longer in dispute. ”
Where was the claim that a sale took place???? I’ve never heard that advanced, the claim was that Saddam was making overtures to Niger to feel them out about a possible sale down the road….. never that a sale took place…. I believe that this is a strawman. Since we never said this why are you arguing against it?
So when the Niger officials said that they believed that the reference made by the Iraqi official was for Uranium and when Joe Wilson came back and told the CIA this same information - now you accept it as true?? Great, then there isn’t anything to argue about.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
Almost forgot, also this administration has consistently attempted to undermine or slant scientific research in such a way to support their own ideological beliefs.
Two examples I recall offhand are the report on global warming that was rewritten to make it seem as if it wasn’t really happening, and the way the FDA decided despite all the good science on Plan B saying it’s safe to prevent it from being available over the counter. I’m sure there’s many more examples as well.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
Cal,
I don’t doubt that Wilson’s and Plame’s names come up on a lot of blogs, both liberal and conservative, what with the Fitzgerald investigation going on.
I hope that you are wrong that liberals are relying on Wilson or Plame for any argument that they might be making today. That would seem pointless, and would also make for a weak foundation for an argument.
I say both sides of the debate should only mention them as necessary when reporting on the Fitzgerald investigation. They are nothing but a distraction at this point.
November 15th, 2005 at 5:07 pm
Interesting…it appears as if two of my posts on this thread were removed…
November 15th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
“I think the problem here is that we are quite likely to lose this war…If we were winning …”
Likely to lose the war? “If” we were winning? Yeah, right. Here’s an example of our “losing” the war:
Soldiers with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment from Fort Wainwright detained one of the principal financiers of the al-Qaeda cell in Mosul.
Lt. Col. Charles Webster, who spoke to KTUU-TV by phone from Mosul, says they got a tip while questioning suspects detained by Iraqi police.
“He gave us names, he gave us the cell structure, he gave us the mode of how they did the operation. He explained to us how they received their weapons, how they got paid, where they parked their car, the parking lots that they used. And he told us about the two head guys,� said Webster.
Webster says since the capture of the “head guy,â€Â? he’s noticed a significant reduction in drive-by shootings.
http://www.ktuu.com/cms/templates/master.asp?articleid=1865&zoneid=1
November 15th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
Hrm. Guess my history was rewritten by someone who didn’t agree with me.