The war fraud

Jules Witcover, who is still one of the ablest political reporters around and has never gone down the sad road of the David Broders or the David Brookes, and Lord knows not the road of Judy Miller and Bob Woodward (who is already being given nicknames like JudyWood), sees right through the latest phony, malicious anyone-who-criticizes-Dear-Leader-Bush-is-helping-The-Terrorists pile of bullpucky: Bush's New War on Dissent Tribune Media Services 11/16/05.

President Bush declared war on dissent the other day by charging that congressional Democrats "send the wrong signal to our troops" when they accuse him of having invaded Iraq on the basis of flawed and manipulated intelligence.

Thrown on the defensive by belated questions about the war's origins, the president once more resorted to patriotism, the invoking of which Samuel Johnson memorably called "the last refuge of a scoundrel." Doing so was no surprise. Ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bush has played the patriotism card to rally support and condemn his critics.

Bush is posing with soldiers, who constitute a captive audience who obviously aren't free to heckle and boo their Deceiver-in-Chief during his speeches. And, as one of Josh Marshall's correspondents mentioned the other day, since when did it become appropriate for the President to give a Veterans Day speech before uniformed troops on a Army base and blast the opposition party? Especially since he effectively called them traitors.


And, of course, he and Dark Lord Cheney and the rest of the Party are claiming, well, hey, a lot of Democrats were stupid enough to accept our phony intelligence claims and gullible enough to vote for the war resolution that we violated anyway. So how can they criticize us now?

Bush's charge, implying the undercutting of U.S. troops in Iraq, brought a countercharge from his 2004 presidential challenger, Sen. John Kerry, of "cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition." That, indeed, is at the core of the Democratic allegation - that the intelligence was selectively skewered to encourage support of the war resolution. ...

For an extremely long time, President Bush was able to brush aside questions about the origins and wisdom of his invasion of Iraq. He continued to insist there was a link between Iraq and the al-Qaida perpetrators of 9/11 that justified the invasion, along with the flawed intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction posing a direct threat to U.S. security.

From those premises, it was a short jump to declaring Iraq part of the broader war on terrorism, when in fact it was Bush's invasion that made it so. For this reason, continued investigation of the war's beginning, rather than being a tiresome irrelevancy, remains imperative in evaluating Bush's foreign-policy stewardship, and his credibility.

Witcover goes on to criticize Kerry - rightly, in my view - for not making the fraudulent case for war the center of his presidential campaign last year. The war based on lies to combat "weapons of mass destruction" that didn't exist is only the most destructive example of the routine scamming of the public that has become standard operating procedure for the Christian Republican Torture Party.

Now that the war's origins are plaguing Bush anew, a centerpiece of his own defense is that most of his Democratic critics in Congress, like Kerry, voted in 2002 for the use of force in Iraq. They included Kerry's running mate, then Sen. John Edwards, who recently said flatly in a newspaper article that "I was wrong," and had he known the intelligence was flawed, "I never would have voted for this war."

Other, more skeptical Democrats, such as Sen. Ted Kennedy, voted against the war, leading White House press secretary Scott McClellan to say, "If America were to follow Senator Kennedy's foreign policy, Saddam Hussein would not only still be in power, he would be oppressing and occupying Kuwait."

It seems that, prowar or antiwar, Democrats are evil in the eyes of the Torture Party. Witcover is on target in saying:

Such comments should not, however, divert the legitimate pursuit of detailed answers on how and why Bush got the country into his great misadventure in Iraq.

Witcover has written elsewhere that he was proud of his own continuing skepticism about the war claims all along. He said his biggest regret of his reporting pre-2005 is that he didn't explicitly argue in print that Bush should be impeached, even though the political prospects of that even now seem dim.

But getting less dim almost by the day, it seems lately.