Deciding that it would be easier to defend the position that Bush is a fool rather than a liar,
E.J. Dionne says that the administration simply fooled themselves. Apparently Dionne arrived at this conclusion through clairvoyance or had a gut feeling because he certainly offers no proof and doesn't bother to mention any evidence to the contrary.
The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration.
The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. [...]
The more logical explanation is that they didn't know what they were talking about.
Talk about damning with faint praise! As I read the column I alternately agreed and was annoyed by what was said...on one hand it was highly critical of the administration, while on the other, seeming to excuse them as being only guilty of optimism.
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Dionne offers what I believe is supposed to constitute proof that there's no way the administration lied in the lead-up to the war:
They did not prepare the American people for an arduous struggle because they honestly didn't expect one.
How else to explain the fact that the president and his lieutenants consistently played down the costs of the endeavor, the number of troops required, the difficulties of overcoming tensions among the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds?
<waving my hand in the air> How else to explain it? How about this? They didn't prepare the American people because they weren't going to take the chance that their already decided on war be derailed.
Mr. Dionne really has to stretch to absolve Dick Cheney. After recounting Cheney's now famous MTP appearance where he assured America that we'd be greeted as liberators, Dionne says:
Was Cheney disguising the war's costs for political purposes? It's more likely that he believed every word he said. That suggests that the administration was not misleading the American people nearly so much as it was misleading itself.
Okay, E.J., he was just fooling himself...caught up in the fervor of democracy, no doubt. We'll just forget about what then Secretary of Defense Cheney said in 1991 when asked about pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam:
If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?
Yeah, he believed every word he said when he claimed we'd be greeted as liberators.