“Our friends and allies had the same intelligence that we had when it came to Saddam Hussein. And now, we need to continue to move forward to find out what went wrong and to correct those flaws.”
That was White House press secretary Scott McClellan speaking in the aftermath of news that the 1,200-person team that has spent nearly two years searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, at a cost of millions of dollars, has called it quits. Having found neither WMD nor any significant capability of making them, it’s all over but the writing of a report due out in a few weeks.
So typically, McClellan’s statement is the functional equivalent of a blithe, “Moving right along . . .” The simple truth is that Bush and his people have tried for nearly two years to disappear and otherwise obfuscate his near-hysterical prewar assertions about Iraq’s WMD’s and the danger they posed. Then, Bush wasn’t just talking threat; it was a crisis of historical proportions.
The simple truth is that an incompetent president blustered, bullied and blundered this country’s way into a war that’s cost more than 1,360 American military people their lives and, now, going on $300 billion. Those aren’t things Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld or McClellan care to dwell on.
The attempt to lighten the load of blameworthiness by sharing it with “our friends and allies” notwithstanding, the truth is that President George W. Bush was alone in crying wolf in the months leading up to our ill-fated, unnecessary invasion of Iraq.
Other leaders, other U.S. officials, believed Iraq had WMD, it’s true. But no other national leader, not even Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, posited Iraq as such an imminent, mortal threat that immediate military action was the only sane response.
A news story on this quotes someone making good sense. Not surprisingly, it’s House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, and she said a mouthful:
“Now that the search is finished, President Bush needs to explain to the American people why he was so wrong, for so long, about the reasons for war.
“After a war that has consumed nearly two years and millions of dollars, and a war that has cost thousands of lives, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, nor has any evidence been uncovered that such weapons were moved to another country. Not only was there not an imminent threat to the United States, the threat described in such alarmist tones by President Bush and the most senior members of his administration did not exist at all.”
We will reiterate: President Bush needs to explain to the American people why he was so wrong. No ducking, no blame-shifting, just an honest, clear explanation.
