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Bush Revisionism begins

Scott Ritter was one of the many who was right about the Iraq War from the start. As a former weapons inspector he had the credentials to venture an opinion about whether Saddam had WMDs. Ritter said he didn’t, and as a reward Ritter’s sanity was questioned. Having now been proven to be indisputably right, he has been banished, as is only right and proper, from the American media. In our topsy turvy world, nothing succeeds like being wrong (see, e.g., Bill Kristol) and nothing is more toxic than being right. Things are a bit different in Britain, where Ritter still has an audience.Today, in the Guardian, he comments on George Bush’s recent interview with Charles Gibson, which interview constituted the opening salvo in a new Bush War: the war against History, in which W attempts to absolve himself of incompetence, corruption and criminality. Ritter is having nothing of it:

Try as he might to spread responsibility for his actions by pointing out that “a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein,” the fact is WMD was simply an excuse used by the president to fulfil his self-proclaimed destiny as a war-time president who would avenge his father’s inability (or, more accurately, sage unwillingness) to finish the job back in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war.

Of course, we all know that now. It’s worth repeating that a lot of us also knew it then.

No doubt Bush chose Gibson for a reason: the non-existent followup. I didn’t watch it-the man still makes me gag-but I did see this snippet on TV and it brought me up short:

GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

It’s quite true. He didn’t tell us he intended to get us into war. He would have lost had he done that. But he intended it nonetheless. It was, in fact totally expected. Remember the first of the really solid anti-Bush books, The Price of Loyalty, in which Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed the following:

On most mornings, O’Neill received a package of documents from his aides to prepare him for the day’s meetings. His papers for February 1, 2001, included an agenda for an NSC meeting to be held in the White House Situation Room that afternoon on U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf. The agenda, which refers to a classified paper on a “Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq,” is one of several memos that showed how regime change in Iraq and handling the post-war nation dominated discussions of foreign policy in the first days of the administration.

That’s just one small bit of evidence among many others in the public domain that proves that from the very start, Bush was looking to start a war, and was perfectly happy, in the words of the Downing Street Memo, to see that “intelligence and facts [were] fixed around the policy”.

Naturally, Gibson didn’t bring up such uncomfortable facts. He just changed the subject.

Expect a lot more of this historical revisionism in the coming years. Much of the media will happily enable this historical whitewashing project, because they were so deeply enmeshed in selling the war at the time. If they can whitewash Bush, then they get whitewashed too.


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