The Clare Luce
Democrats November 3, 2005
Harry Reid pulled the Senate into closed session Tuesday,
claiming that "The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is
really all about, how this Administration manufactured and manipulated
intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq." But the Minority Leader's
statement was as demonstrably false as his stunt was transparently
political.
What Mr. Reid's pose is "really all about" is the emergence
of the Clare Boothe Luce Democrats. We're referring to the 20th-century
playwright, and wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, who was most
famous for declaring that Franklin D. Roosevelt had "lied us into war"
with the Nazis and Tojo. So intense was the hatred of FDR among some
Republicans that they held fast to this slander for years, with many
taking their paranoia to their graves.
We are now seeing the spectacle of Bush-hating Democrats
adopting a similar slander against the current President regarding the
Iraq War. The indictment by Patrick Fitzgerald of Vice Presidential aide
I. Lewis Libby has become their latest opening to promote this fiction,
notwithstanding the mountains of contrary evidence. To wit:
In July 2004, the Senate
Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found
numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush
Administration's role, "The Committee did not find any evidence that
Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure
analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction," (our emphasis). The Butler Report, published by the British in
July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion,"
although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar
intelligence. The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD
intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political
pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of
Iraq's weapons programs.
analysts universally asserted that in no
instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their
analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence
and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that
produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments." Finally, last Friday, there was Mr. Fitzgerald:
"This indictment's not about the propriety of the war, and people who
believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are
-- have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any
resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel."
In short, everyone who has looked into the question
of whether the Bush administration lied about intelligence, distorted
intelligence, or pressured intelligence agencies to produce assessments
that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq has come
up with the same answer: No, no, no and no.
Everyone, that is, except Joseph Wilson IV. He first became
the Democrats' darling in July 2003, when he published an op-ed claiming
he'd debunked Mr. Bush's "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to purchase African
yellowcake and that the Administration had distorted the evidence about
Saddam's weapons programs to fit its agenda. This Wilson tale fit the
"lied us into war" narrative so well that he was adopted by the John Kerry
presidential campaign.
Only to be dropped faster than a Paris Hilton boyfriend
after the Senate Intelligence and Butler reports were published. Those
reports clearly showed that, while Saddam had probably not purchased
yellowcake from Niger, the dictator had almost certainly tried -- and that
Mr. Wilson's own briefing of the CIA after his mission supported that
conclusion. Mr. Wilson somehow omitted that fact from his public accounts
at the time.
He also omitted to explain why the CIA had sent him to
Niger: His wife, who worked at the CIA, had suggested his name for the
trip, a fact Mr. Wilson also denied, but which has also since been proven.
In other words, the only real support there has ever been for the "Bush
lied" storyline came from a man who is himself a demonstrable liar. If we
were Nick Kristof and the other writers who reported Mr. Wilson's facts as
gospel, we'd be apologizing to our readers.
Yet, incredibly, Mr. Wilson has once again become the
Democrats' favorite mascot because they want him as a prop for their "lied
us into war" revival campaign. They must think the media are stupid,
because so many Democrats are themselves on the record in the pre-Iraq War
period as declaring that Saddam had WMD. Here is Al Gore from September
23, 2002, amid the Congressional debate over going to war: "We know that
he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons
throughout his country."
Or Hillary Rodham Clinton, from October 10, 2002: "In the
four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that
Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons
stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has
also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda
members
"
Or Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic Vice Chairman of
the Intelligence Committee, who is now leading the "Bush lied" brigades
(from October 10, 2002): "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam
Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely
have nuclear weapons within the next five years
We also should remember
we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development
of weapons of mass destruction." If Mr. Bush is a liar, what does the use
of the phrase "unmistakable evidence" make Mr. Rockefeller? A fool?
The scandal here isn't what happened before the war. The
scandal is that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr.
Bush saw, who drew the same conclusions, and who voted to go to war are
now using the difficulties we've encountered in that conflict as an excuse
to rewrite history. Are Republicans really going to let them get away with
it?
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