Directly from the book:
McClellan says Bush’s reason for war always was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the middle East through the spread of freedom”. But Bush and his advisers made “a marketing choice” to downplay this rationale in favor of one focused on increasingly trumped-up portayals of the threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction.
So Bush’s reason for going to war with Iraq was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the middle East through the spread of freedom”. I guess this knocks the wind out of the sales of the Bush haters, and blows the ‘conquer Iraq for oil’ theory, doesn’t it?
McClellan writes: “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder.”
In fact, “history” is poised to do no such thing. Al-Qaida is on the run, and the U.S. is on the cusp of victory in Iraq (for another view of our success in the War on Terror, see “Verbatim,” page A11). Years from now we think Americans will see this as a turning point in history, a time when an American leader stood up to protect Western Civilization following the barbarous attacks of 9/11.
We don’t have space here to refute everything. But one charge in McClellan’s 341-page tome stands out, so we’ll focus on that: The Bush White House conducted a dishonest “political propaganda campaign” to sell the war to the American people.
Start with the obvious: Wasn’t it McClellan’s job to resign in protest if he thought the American people were being misled? If so, this was his own failing, not Bush’s.
Moreover, contrary to the common wisdom, Bush’s rationale for taking out Saddam Hussein was about many things — not just one.
Yes, he expressed concern Saddam would get a nuclear weapon with which to blackmail both his neighbors and the West.
But Bush also wanted to halt the spread of terror, deny a possible haven for al-Qaida, and promote democracy in the Mideast, among other things. As ex-Pentagon official Doug Feith recently noted, Bush delivered 24 major speeches on Iraq from Sept. 2002 to Sept. 2004. In them, he made a wide-ranging, nuanced case for getting rid of Saddam. It wasn’t only about WMD.
Yet, McClellan claims Bush was “shading the truth.” Well, what truth did he shade? WMD? In fact, the CIA assessment of Iraq that Bush used was made during President Clinton’s final year in office. It said that Saddam had a WMD program and, quite possibly, a nuclear weapon. Every major intelligence agency — Britain’s, France’s, Russia’s, Germany’s, Israel’s, even the U.N.’s — agreed.
Yes, as it turns out, some of that intelligence was wrong. Even so, reasons for getting rid of Saddam were too numerous to ignore. In October of 2002, Congress cited no fewer than 23 reasons when it overwhelmingly gave Bush the right to remove Saddam.
Bush was clear from the start, and dead honest: This was about defending our nation from the insane jihadists who had declared war on us from their safe-havens in the Mideast. McClellan, blinded by his anger, can’t see this. The American people someday will.
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