Ask Karl Rove for an apology? Not me. Apologies
are appropriate for
foolish remarks made in the heat of argument.
Rove read from a script.
The White House handed out copies. Besides, what
would an apology from
that flabby little apparatchik be worth? He’s
the human equivalent of a
fear-biting dog: His Master’s Voice. "Conservatives,"
Rove said, "saw
the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared
for war. Liberals saw
the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to
prepare indictments and
offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
In the wake of 9/11,
conservatives believed it was time to unleash
the might and power of the
United States military against the Taliban. In
the wake of 9/11, liberals
believed it was time to submit a petition. I
am not joking." No, he was
fabricating. The House gave President Bush the
authority to attack the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden by a vote of 420-1.
The Senate voted
unanimously, 98-0. To my knowledge, nobody mentioned
therapy.
The usual Washington pundits say Rove wasn’t attacking
Democrats,
only "liberals." Oh, really? Rove claimed that
the party chairman, Howard
Dean, opposed fighting the Taliban. In fact,
Dean supported the Afghan
war. He criticized Bush for letting bin Laden
escape in order to pursue
his obsession with Saddam Hussein.
Rove also alleged that Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin’s
poorly worded
response to an FBI report detailing torture by
American soldiers at
Guantanamo Bay "certainly [put] America’s men
and women in uniform in
greater danger. No more needs to be said about
the motives of liberals."
See, it’s not torture that inflames opinion in
the Muslim world, it’s what
American politicians say about it. In other words,
according to Bush’s
right-hand man, Durbin, the Senate Democratic
whip, wants to see
American soldiers killed.
That’s how desperate the White House has become
to distract attention
from the disaster in Iraq and the propaganda
campaign that got us there.
The idea is to pump up the Bush cult of personality,
equate dissent with
disloyalty and warn wavering Republicans that
they, too, can be smeared.
It’s as cowardly as it is contemptible.
In response, let’s return to that famous Downing
Street memo of July 22,
2002. Written by the head of British intelligence,
it stated that Bush had
already decided to overthrow Saddam, "justified
by the conjunction of
terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed
around the policy."
Instead of debating the meaning of "fixed," Bob
Somerby’s inimitable Web
site The Daily Howler asked a simple question:
What happened next? Based
on Bob Woodward’s "Plan of Attack," a book Bush
personally urged the
reporter to write, Somerby lays out the evidence.
It ain’t pretty.
That summer, Bush insisted publicly that war wasn’t
what he wanted. To
White House chagrin, his father’s foreign policy
team, Gen. Brent Scowcroft
and Secretary of State James Baker, wrote articles
warning that invading Iraq
could become a major strategic blunder—basically
what Gen. Colin Powell
also thought.
While Bush vacationed in Texas during August 2002,
Vice President Dick
Cheney gave bellicose speeches declaring that
there was "no doubt" that
Iraq would soon acquire a nuclear arsenal. He
warned that Saddam "could
then be expected to seek domination of the entire
Middle East, take control
of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies,
directly threaten America’s
friends throughout the region, and subject the
United States or any other
nation to nuclear blackmail."
In reality, the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate
claimed only that
Saddam maintained an "infrastructure capable
of producing" chemical
weapons and possible "low-level theoretical R
& D" regarding nukes.
In September, the drumbeat became relentless.
Using the anniversary of
9/11 as its focus, the administration leaked
to The New York Times a
bogus story about Iraq acquiring aluminum tubes
for centrifuges to enrich
uranium for nuclear weapons. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld
and Condi Rice
appeared on the Sunday talk shows. Rice memorably
warned, "We don’t
want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Again, that’s not what intelligence experts thought,
as John Judis and
Spencer Ackerman reported in an unjustifiably
neglected June 30, 2003,
article in The New Republic. Next came Rummy
claiming "bulletproof"
evidence of operational links between Iraq and
al-Qa’ida that didn’t
exist. On Oct. 7, 2002, Bush himself warned that
"[t] he Iraqi dictator
must not be permitted to threaten America and
the world with horrible
poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."
He claimed that Iraq
had "unmanned aerial vehicles" capable of "missions
targeting the United
States." Their actual range was 300 miles; too
short to allow, say,
Oklahoma to target Austin, Texas. During his
State of the Union message
in January 2003, Bush made his now infamous reference
to Saddam’s
supposed attempts to buy uranium in Africa based
upon a crudely forged
document whose suspect origins were already known.
Did they fix the
evidence? To borrow a phrase, it’s a "slam dunk."
Karl Rove doesn’t want
you to know it.