I was going to diary Sen. Obama's op-ed in the Trib, but
baldandy beat me to the punch. Instead, let me draw people's attention to E.J. Dionne's op-ed in this morning's WaPo, where he rips Bush's attempt to blame the Democrats on Iraq.
The column can be found here.
Another Set of Scare Tactics
The title really says it all. Bush isn't trying to make a substansive argument; he's trying to scare us. Same old strategy. But it doesn't seem to be working as well as it did 2 or 3 years ago.
Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of having "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," Bush declared last week. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."
You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy by daring to seek the indictment of Scooter Libby on a charge of perjury and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our troops desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the administration? (my emphasis)
That's the key flaw in Bush's argument. His case is that "any criticism of the administration will demoralize the troops." If people start framing it that way, it will make him look like a petulant whiner who is trying to hide behind the soldiers to protect himself. The fact that he is a petulant whiner who is trying to hide behind soldiers makes this frame an easy one.
The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.
The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.
Like father, unlike son. I wonder whether Dad approves of what Junior is doing to the family name. There's a lot to dislike about Bush Sr., but compared to his son, he's virtually an Abraham Lincoln. Junior took the easy route, applying enough temporary pressure to force the vote through using raw partisanship. Only problem is that once the pressure wears off, the underlying rationale was so weak that the backlash is going to be ferocious.
The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.
Mr. President:
You made this war a partisan issue.
You forced it through with only limited debate and examination of the intelligence.
You own it.
Also from WaPo, Tom Toles makes the same case in a pithier way:
-dms