On Friday, in the face of anemic approval ratings, pressing questions about trust and ethics, and plummeting public support for the war in Iraq, President Bush took a mighty rhetorical swing in an effort to save his presidency. Not surprisingly, his verbal attack was based on lies and half-truths. Because the American people appear to have emerged from their four year affair with the politics of fear, it will be even less surprising if these lies and half-truths fail to improve even marginally the White House's public standing.
The president's Veteran's Day speech was, for the most part, the same speech he customarily gives on the Iraq War and the broader war on terrorism. In fact, it appears to have been mostly copied word-for-word from a speech given at the National Endowment for Democracy on October 6 of this year. Aside from the usual desperate claims that Iraq is a central part of the war on terror, however, the Veteran's Day speech included a few paragraphs that directly attacked those high profile Democrats who claim that the administration lied to push the United States into war in Iraq. This defensive offensive, though, is unlikely save him from his early lame-duck status. He does not address a public which now sees him as arrogant and untrustworthy by taking responsibility and apologizing for the rush to war. Instead, he eschews the truth in favor of a more comfortable narrative, popular already within Republican circles, which attempts to spread blame to intelligence agencies and Democratic members of Congress.
Bush self-righteously claims that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history" of how the Iraq War was initiated. He immediately does just that. The president claims that Democrats and other "anti-war critics" are wrong to propose that his administration "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" about the Iraqi threat. Bush's case that this is inappropriate is based on three claims: that the Senate intelligence committee investigated the intelligence failure and determined that there was no political pressure on the intelligence community; that the intelligence community in general agreed with "our assessment of Saddam"; and that Democrats who had access to the same intelligence that Bush had access to "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." These claims are, like the Bush administration's case against Saddam Hussein, fatally flawed by a fundamental disregard for the truth.
Bush's claim that the Senate intelligence committee did not find evidence of political pressure on the intelligence community is technically correct, but it fails to respond to the claim of manipulation of intelligence. The question is not whether the Bush administration pushed the CIA to tailor the intelligence to its designs, but rather whether the administration misrepresented the nature of the intelligence in the case it made to Congress and to the American people. The Senate Intelligence Committee, while charged with the task since well before the 2004 presidential election, has not yet completed this phase of the investigation.
Bush's next claim, that the intelligence community agreed with the American assessment of Saddam Hussein, could also be interpreted as correct. The global intelligence community did agree in general that Saddam Hussein had, in one form or another, a WMD program. However, this was only half of the American assessment of Saddam Hussein. The other half was the extremely controversial claim that Saddam Hussein had close connections with al Qaeda and was therefore an imminent threat to American security. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency were not even in agreement with the White House with regard to the Iraq-al Qaeda axis.
Bush's claim that a huge number of Democrats came to the same conclusion as he had after seeing the same intelligence he had is simply dishonest. The president is lying when he claims that Democrats in congress were presented with the same intelligence. While the president has essentially unlimited access to the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, Congress must go through more limited channels, which are largely controlled by the White House.
President Bush's Veteran's Day defense is simply one more example that the buck no longer even passes through the Oval Office, much less stops there. Bush is still playing games with Americans, telling them that senators or congressmen are to blame for the Iraq mess because they voted to support "removing Saddam from power," when in fact the resolution mentioned only last-resort use of force to disarm, not regime change, as authorized actions. In the end, the chief executive is responsible for foreign policy. As hard as this president tries to point fingers and rewrite history, the American people must not let him run from his legacy.
