Rove Book: No Pushback on Iraq WMD My Bad
Next week, Karl Rove's memoir Courage and Consequence hits the bookshelves. But as the previews make clear, you won't have to wait until March 9th to appreciate Rove's gift for fiction. According to the AP, his revisionist history claims that "many of the controversies that weakened his presidency were falsehoods perpetuated by political opponents," including the disastrous Hurricane Katrina response he laid at the feet of Democrats Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco.
But in one area, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Karl Rove will do what George W. Bush never did: admit a mistake. Sadly, the error Rove confesses is the uniquely Republican sin of not lying more.
As the AP described it, Rove's tall tale can be summarized as "if lying about WMD is wrong, I don't want to be right":
The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.
Of course, it's hard to imagine how the Bush administration could have pushed back any harder against charges that the President misled the nation into war. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed the fraud that was Bush's 16-word claim about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, the retribution included the outing of his wife Valerie Plame, covert CIA operative. The White House initially opposed the creation of the independent Silberman-Robb commission, later agreeing only on the conditions that its report be released after the 2004 elections and exclude any investigation of the uses of pre-war intelligence. Thanks to the obstructionism of Bush ally Pat Roberts, the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase I report on Iraq war intel played the same game. As Democratic Senator Rockefeller lamented upon its release of its findings, "virtually everything that has to do with the administration has been relegated to Phase Two."
If Bush's Brain and his presidential hand puppet stumbled in their manufactured smoke screen about the absence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, it was by joking about it.
President Bush's response to collapse of his primary rational for the war against Saddam was to laugh it off. David Corn recalled Bush's performance at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, in which the Comic-in-Chief regaled the audience with his White House hijinx:
Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.
Asked during an April 2004 press conference if could name a single mistake he made as President, George W. Bush was surprised that his near-papal aura of infallibility had been challenged:
"I'm sure something will pop into my head here...maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
Only later would President Bush come up with the stock response he would use to evade accountability for his calamitous tenure. As he told Scott Pelley of CBS in January 2007:
"You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, "bring them on" was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it."
But it was former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who first pioneered the "we should have lied more" defense Karl Rove will publish next week. Rejecting criticism over the handling of U.S. attorneys purge, Gonzales in December 2009 announced that the problem wasn't that the Bush Justice Department wasn't too political, but that it wasn't political enough:
"We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it."
Karl Rove couldn't agree more. (Maybe that's why he didn't title the book, "Truth or Consequences.") Even after President Bush left office, his water-carriers continued to perpetuate the myth that Iraq was linked to 9/11 and Al Qaeda. As for the controversy over WMD in Iraq, as Rove now seems to be saying, "that was my bad."
UPDATE: The New York Times has more on the Rove book in Peter Baker's piece titled simply, "Rove on Iraq: Without W.M.D. Threat, Bush Wouldn't Have Gone to War." As Baker writes:
"Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D.? I doubt it," he writes. "Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations."
He adds: "So, then, did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not." But Mr. Rove said the White House had only a "weak response" to the harmful allegation, which became "a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency."
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