Stung by poll numbers that show that more and more Americans doubt President Bush on Iraq the Bush administration is preparing a counter attack, according the New York Times. In typical Bush/Rove fashion the counter attack will be both personal and dishonest.
The intention appears to be to attack his opponents as hypocrites because many of them also believed that the Iraq regime possessed weapons of Mass destruction and voted for the "Force Authorization" resolution. It is essentially the same line the Bushies have been trotting out since the Kay report came out, with an added emphasis on the personal attack. While it had been largely successful in the past, it likely to meet with a deserved failure this time, outside Bush's ever shrinking base.
The defense is misleading and dishonest because it ignores a number of facts about the run up to war and is intentionally too narrowly focused. The Bushies focus their entire energy on the WMD debate in September and October of 2002, but ignore their own actions both before and after that vote, as well as other aspects of the debate.
- Bush claims that the Democrats in Congress had access to the same intelligence as the administration, this is untrue. The Congress did have access to the National Intelligence report, but the administration had far more access to both intelligence analysis and raw intelligence. In those reports and data there was more than enough information to cause doubt about the existence and extent of any WMD program, if the administration had been looking for it.
- Bush ignores the effect his administration had on shaping those intelligence products. The pro-War sentiment in the administration was widely known in the intelligence community, the questions pointed at any counter intelligence analysis were chilling and Cheney's role in particular were all channeling the intelligence analysis in one direction only.
- They ignore the entire UN inspection period between the vote and the start of the war. It is extremely telling that the Bushies never reference this period, because they never took the inspections seriously and fully planned to go to war no matter what was or was not found. But during the inspection the existence and extent of any WMD program came into increasing doubt, and the Bushies ignored that evidence.
- They also conveniently forget their other misleading statements in the run up to war. If ridding the Middle East of the threat posed by the Hussein regime was the benefit of going to war, the costs too were consistently understated by the administration, in troop levels required, in costs in dollars, and most pointedly in US dead and wounded. I suspect the US public would actually be much more forgiving of the WMD deception if the costs had been more in line with the Bush administrations pre-war sales pitch.
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