Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Iraq War: The campaign issues

Patrick and I have been having a running exchange the last few days here and at his blog over Kerry's vote on the Iraq War and Bush's conduct of same.

Kerry's position is not hard to understand.  To paraphrase the incomparable Daily Howler in more AOL-TOS-friendly language, Kerry's position is this:  I voted to give President Bush the authority.  Then President Bush screwed it up.

Bush's attempt to ridicule Kerry's position as being confusing is also not hard to understand.  Bush's position is:  I'm strong and confident and familiar.  Kerry is confusing and uncertain and untrustworthy.

It's not a new political strategy for the Bush dynasty.  Old Man Bush in 1992 tried to label his challenger Bill Clinton as a "waffler."  While Bush's campaign pumped up "bimbo explosions" and rumors that Clinton was a Soviet spy.

Think I'm exaggerating?  Bush brought up that latter charge in one his debates with Clinton, who promptly stuffed it back down Bush's throat.

Our current George Bush did essentially the same thing with Al Gore in 2000.,  Despite Gore''s being a far more familiar figure nationally, Bush's campaign eagerly seized on the media's savaging of Gore for "reinventing himself" and the Republicans ridiculed Gore's alleged inconsistencies.

How well does that strategy work?  Old Man Bush lost the 1992 election to Clinton.  Bush the Younger lost the 2000 election to Gore.  So as a Kerry partisan, I'm tempted to say, "Go head on with that strategy, guys!"

Now to some of Patrick's points.  In the comments to this post, he refers to people who think that Saddam Hussein's Iraq "never" had weapons of mass destruction.  But who are those people?  I don't believe even Saddam Hussein's spokesperson "Comical Ali" ever claimed that Iraq had never had WMDs.

And prior to the war, even the severest critics of Bush's claims, like former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, thought it possibile that some stocks of chem/bio might still be around.  Although those who were paying close attention at the time could see that experts were saying the older stocks that had not been accounted for by the UN inspectors would be largely if not completely inert by 2002-3, making them of little use as either battlefield or terrorist weapons.

Patrick presents an argument that suddenly became popular with Bush defenders in 2003, when it began to dawn on even them that no WMDs were going to be found in Iraq.  He cites a number of statements by prominent Democrats over the last few years indicating that they also thought Iraq still had WMDs.  The suggestion is somehow no Democrat should criticize Bush for bad intelligence, misuse of intelligence or bad judgment in going to war with Iraq.

In this case, it seems to me that our experience the last two years has vindicated those who thought Iraq might have WMDs but who didn't think the threat was strong enough to justify war.  Since there were no WMDs there and no nuclear program, I would say that they have been rather spectacularly vindicated.

And should voting for the October 2002 war resolution remove the ability of a member of Congress to criticize Bush's conduct of the war?  I suppose from the Republicans' point of view, it does.

As I've said before, my own view is that it would have been preferable for the Congress to postpone giving Bush a war resolution until the process of inspections had proceeded much farther.

But that position is not the one John Kerry took, nor did most congressional Democrats.  Kerry voted to give Bush the authority to go to war if he could demonstrate that two specific conditions were met.  But Kerry thinks Bush used that authority badly.  (See summary above.)  And he has a number of criticisms of how Bush has mismanaged the Iraq War.

Kerry's position may well be too "nuanced" for loyal Republicans to grasp.  And if Republicans can't grasp it, is their any hope for our political press corps?  But I doubt that it's nearly so obscure to most people.  If they get to hear it, that is.

Patrick also wonder when the lying began about Iraqi WMDs.  Short of a full-blown impeachment investigation, we're unlikely to know for years just how much of the administration's claims on Iraqi WMDs was conscious and deliberate falsification versus "only" hype, exaggeration, carelessness and gullibility.

The push for war with Iraq began with with Bush's "axis of evil" speech in early 2002 and accelerated greatly in the second half of the year.  It was based on false claims and bad judgment from the very start.  There have literally been volumes written about this already.

But it's clear that by the time of the push for the congressional vote in October 2002, the Bush administration was making claims far beyond what any reasonable view of the available intelligence information justified, particularly with regard to Iraq's non-existent nuclear weapons program.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great observations, Bruce!  Recently my dad (who although he supports Bush live, thankfully, in the relatively insignificant state of Nebr) emailed me a collection of those quotes from Democrats about Saddam and the WMD (which coincidentally I also saw on an AOL journal recently where that journalist was complimented for his "research").  I replied to my dad that obviously those Dems didn't think it was enough of a threat to go to war on, and I then I asked him how he could trust Bush if Bush obviously found the words of such "awful" people so credible?  He wrote back, saying "Good point."

Anonymous said...

Ha!  That's a good one.  I'll have to steal that argument myself.  "How can you trust Bush if he believes what *liberals* and *Democrats* say?"  I like that. - Bruce