The loutish senior senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, bloviated again recently about President Bush's supposed deceptions over Iraq, this time to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The evidence so far leads to only one conclusion. What happened was not merely a failure of intelligence, but the result of manipulation and distortion of the intelligence and selective use of unreliable intelligence to justify a decision to go to war. The administration had made up its mind, and would not let stubborn facts stand in the way.
Today, speaking before the CFR a week later, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona has demolished Kennedy's recklessly partisan comments with a prosecuter's eye for detail -- point by point, blow by blow. I'm sure Kyl's response will receive about 1% of the attention that Kennedy received, so read the whole thing for yourself.
It is especially troubling that Senator Kennedy hints that the Bush administration took us to war for political reasons: "The politics of the election trumped the stubborn facts," he says. That charge, if more than just over-the-top bluster, would be close to an allegation of treason--suggesting that the president deliberately put our young men and women in harm's way for no purpose other than politics. Such a charge would not only sap the morale of the troops who are fighting even now; it would undercut our entire position in the war on terror generally and in Iraq specifically.Posted by Alan at March 13, 2004 12:59 AMTo claim: "It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war" is likewise disrespectful, dangerous to morale, and hurtful to our effort to work with other nations in a common effort against despots and tyrants like Saddam Hussein.
When all is said and done, the most amazing claim in Senator Kennedy's speech is his conclusion that: "Congress would never have voted to authorize the war if we had known the facts."
Senator Kennedy voted against the war. He clearly thought he knew the facts, and, to him, they didn't support the war. How is it that he knew the facts, but his colleagues did not? He certainly made his case forcefully at that time. Is he saying now everyone who voted for the war was duped? Is he saying the members of the intelligence committee were duped?
Now, it is possible that not all of the intelligence these senators relied on was totally accurate. But my point is that these were the facts understood by everyone at the time: the United Nations, the intelligence services of our allies, senators on the Intelligence Committee, and the administration.
The reality is, no one was duped. We were all working off of the same data. Reasonable people reached different conclusions about what to do based on a commonly understood set of facts. There is nothing devious about that. One need not veer off into conspiracy theories to explain honest differences of opinion about policies.