Kerry, Gore, Clinton, and Other Hawks

In the last few days it has been difficult to miss the new offensive the Bush administration has launched against the Iraq war critics' revisionism concerning the alleged manipulation of pre-war intelligence (read: "Bush lied, people died."). In a speech this week Bush chastised Democrats for their duplicity, quoting several high-ranking Democrats who before the war unequivocally voiced their opinion that Saddam had weapons that were a threat to the U.S. Donald Rumsfeld also produced today on CNN an embarassing assortment of similar quotes from Democrats (for more, click here).

This leaves the Dems with a couple of options: they can pretend they were stupid and/or gullible by re-playing the "Bush is a sinister mastermind (yet also a bumbling cowboy)" card. They could try and convince everyone that Bush actually had some sort of a secret, omniscient source (God?) that had informed him there actually was no WMD but that he should go ahead and make the case the rest of the world was making at the time anyways. This asinine piece actually flirts with that particular strategy, suggesting the administration knew more than the legislature because "It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read...the National Intelligence Estimate." Even if this assertion that lawmakers wouldn't be able to scrape together the time to read the "nearly 100 pages long" behemoth full of critical intelligence that could help them decide whether they would vote for a war resolution is true, now the legislators' irresponsibility is Bush's fault?

This all would merely be incredibly pathetic were the stakes not so high. It seems self-evident that these false claims can (and more than likely have) hurt the U.S. war effort, contingent as it is upon the resolve of the American people. Playing politics is fine, but not when it is characterized by such overwhelming disingenuousness as we've seen from the anti-war crowd trying to push these claims, and not when it hurts our ability to effectively prosecute the war on terror.

--Josh

Update: The Republican National Committee has created a video montage of bellicose statements directed at Saddam Hussein by Democrats before the Iraq War erupted. Here also is an article revealing then-President Bill Clinton's synopsis of the Iraq situation.