Unpatriotic Slamming of the Administration

[Annie]

I agree with the following, links overwhelming post. There is a point when it becomes a cascade:

http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19346/

Sunday, November 13, 2005
On Patriotism, redux

Yesterday, in response to a post by Glenn Greenwald seeking to compare GOP attacks on Bill Clinton to the current Democratic charges against President Bush over pre-war intelligence, I offered the following rejoinder in Glenn’s comments:

Several things.

1) You forgot to mention that [John] McCain and the Weekly Standard backed Clinton and refused to question his motives—and that many in the GOP excoriated [Dick] Armey.

2) The GOP reps you name weren’t making their accusations in the face of a Senate Intelligence Report (and the Robb report) that concluded the intelligence community wasn’t coerced into making their findings, and that their findings supported the President’s case for war.

3) Questioning patriotism only comes into play in those cases where people are pretending to see a scandal and Presidential lies where they in fact [know] differently.

This is placing political opportunism over country and the foreign policy of the CiC, and it is doing so knowingly and in bad faith.

You can pretend there is no difference between the Clinton and Bush scenarios, but [to do so would require] more dissembling and faux outrage.

The more honest of you will admit the differences. The less honest of you can join the ranks of those who are putting your hatred of Bush over the welfare of the troops and the country.

Sorry if you don’t like to hear it, but that’s the way it is. How many Democrats are willing to argue, as the Weekly Standard did, that Bush didn’t “lie” and “mislead us into war” by “manipulating” or “withholding intelligence”?

Harry Reid? Ted Kennedy? Rockefeller? Pelosi? Dean?

Oh, wait—there’s Zell Miller. But he’s not really a Democrat, is he?

Today, Glenn emailed me to let me know he developed his response into a post, which attempts to answer the questions I raised. Writes Greenwald:

Goldstein’s whole argument rests on the question-begging assumption that, unlike the GOP’s attacks on Clinton, the Democrats’ WMD accusations against Bush have been definitively and dispositively disproven—apparently all because a Senate Committee rejected them—such that no person operating in good faith can continue to believe them. Thus, he reasons, since those who are voicing this WMD accusation can’t really believe it, they must be doing it to harm the President and without regard to the damage it does to our war effort, and that is unpatriotic.

Well, yes and no. I do in fact believe that the WMD accusations against Bush have been dispositively disproven, though not simply because the Senate Intelligence Committee rejected them. Bush gets intelligence reports, he doesn’t pore through raw intelligence data, and so his understanding of intelligence comes from his national security analysts. Anyone who thinks Bush looked at his analysts’ reports and rejected them because he wanted to avenge Daddy or enrich his oil buddies is either terribly confused or purposely dishonest—blinded by their hatred for the President. Those who are confused aren’t unpatriotic; they are, however, ignorant on this point, and are earnestly playing the part of useful idiots. Those who do know how intelligence works—and yet continue to suggest that Bush lied or manipulated intelligence in order to take us to war—are more concerned with damaging the Bush presidency than they are with winning the war.

Greenwald continues:

Let’s put to the side the odd notion that when a Senate Committee speaks, it is to be taken as gospel, such that disagreement with its conclusions is proof that one has lost touch with reality. Let us also put to the side the fact that the question which Goldstein seems to believe that Committee answered—i.e., whether the Administration purposely suppressed and manipulated pre-war WMD intelligence in order to create a false and unduly aggressive National Intelligence Estimate to show to Congress—is precisely the issue which the Committee has not yet answered, because its GOP Chairman, Sen. Roberts, blocked Phase II of the Committee’s investigation (the part which was to deal with that question) until Sen. Reid, with his closed-door Senate “stunt,” recently forced that part of the investigation to proceed.

Again, this is both correct and incorrect, insofar as it attempts to lay out my position.

I don’t believe a Senate Intelligence Committee report should be taken as gospel. But I do believe that quarrels with the report should be substantive and backed up by a host of evidence before Senators stand up in front of the media and accuse the Bushies of what amounts to treason. Greenwald hinges his entire argument on Phase II of the Senate Investigation—which he seems to think will answer the unanswered questions about how the administration used intelligence.

But we already know the answer to that: they used the intelligence to make the case for war.

As I’ve argued here before, Phase II of the investigation is to me irrelevant with respect to questions of WMD and Bush’s honesty; phase I found that the intelligence community wasn’t pressured into shaping the pre-war intelligence. Consequently, we can reasonably conclude from the consensus that they stood behind their analyses, and that the President—in acting on those analyses—acted in good faith. How the administration then used that intelligence to market the case for war is, to me, unimportant.

Just to remind you:

A. Allegations of Influence

(U) Committee staff did interview five individuals who had come to the Committee’s attention as possibly having information that intelligence analysts’ assessments had been influenced by policymakers. None of these individuals provided any information to the Committee which showed that policymakers had attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their analysis or that any intelligence analysts changed their intelligence judgments as a result of political pressure. There was also no information provided to the Committee which showed that analysts had conformed their assessments to known Administration policies because they believed those assessments would be more widely read or accepted. The following describes information garnered from those interviews. [See here]

U) Conclusion 83. 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 capabilities.

(U) Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President’s visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments [See here]

Greenwald again:

Although that investigation is not yet complete, it simply undeniable that there is ample evidence which, if it does not prove, at least permits the good faith assertion that the Administration knew that many of the pre-war WMD claims which it was unequivocally asserting were, in fact, subject to grave doubt. Much of that evidence has been disclosed for the first time just this past week, which is what is fueling the renewal of this debate.

The notion, then, that this entire issue has already been conclusively resolved in Bush’s favor, such that nobody can reasonably discuss it any longer, is nothing more than self-serving, wishful thinking. There is ample documentary and evidentiary support for the belief that the Administration played fast and loose with the pre-war facts in order to sell the war. The only egregious bad faith argumentation that I can see is coming from those screaming “unpatriotic” in order to stifle the debate and prevent it from occurring.

If, as Greenwald wants to suggest, this debate is being fueled anew by questions over individual pieces of intelligence, then he is simply admitting the fault with his thesis. Intelligence is rarely ever 100% conclusive, and deciding upon the veracity of individual pieces of that intelligence is hardly a science. To use individual pieces of disputed evidence to suggest that the administration was somehow engaged in a conscious plan to “mislead” us into war, then, is the very definition of cherry-picking—particularly when we already know what the consensus was.

And the consensus backed the President’s position and supported the case for war. Further, it was a consensus opinion shared by just about every foreign intelligence agency and previous administrations. And lest we forget, regime change was a legislative imperative.

But back to the “questions” over how the administration used intelligence. As commenter Steve Galbreith points out over at Tom Maguire’s place:

Each U.S. Senator has his or her own staff of experts on a whole host of issues, including WMD and military matters. These members are privy to the intelligence material, the raw stuff.

Senators Daschle, Clinton, Levin, Bayh (and I believe several more) all said that they themselves went to Langley to view the intelligence and to talk to the analysts and to have their experts review things. This wasn’t a question of accepting Bush’s word or judgements.

Seriously, you think the above folks aren’t going to check out the details themselves? And get their own experts to inform them on the matter?

This scenario of a wily Svengali manipulating the Democrats into war needs re-writing. I mean, being dazzled and seduced by the oratory skills of George Bush?

The is precisely on point. Senators had ample opportunity to review the raw intelligence data and draw their own conclusions.

Those who did so and are now walking back their previous support for the war are therefore either being disengenuous and opportunistic (in which case, they are putting partisan political considerations above the the safety of the troops and the security of the country) or else are admitting that they themselves were derelict in their duties, voting for a war they now claim the bulk of the intelligence didn’t support.

To get around this latter charge, Dems are now positing that Bush had more intelligence than they themselves were privy to—and they cite as the source of that hidden (and potentially damaging) evidence the President’s daily briefings, which they now intimate might have undermined the case for war. For his part, the President denies that there was anything in those briefings that disrupted the intelligence consensus.

Which, to those of you who are paying close attention, means that the Democrat’s argument boils down to this: Because Bush is a liar, he is probably lying about what was in those PDBs; and because he is lying about what is in those PDBs, the information therein must have underminded the case for war.

And that, friends, is begging the question.

Greenwald goes on:

The broader and more important point here is that these new GOP patriotism attacks are based upon the transparently false notion that Democrats are attacking Bush in a way that the GOP would never have attacked a Democratic President. After 8 years of the most extreme and virulent attacks by the GOP against President Clinton, that claim is just absurd.

Both sides are equally power hungry. At this point, both will use any tactic, provided it is effective (and regardless of whether it is fair or honest) which can hurt the other side’s standing. Both sides are brimming over with individuals and groups which recognize no constraints whatsoever on the rhetoric they employ, the accusations they make, or the devotion to having their side win.

A litmus test for determining whether someone has relinquished their intellectual honesty and replaced it with partisan blindness is whether they believe that the “other side” is more power-hungry than their side, or whether the “other side” will engage in tactics and attacks which their side is too decent and ethical to consider.

[My emphasis]

While it is certainly true that it’s possible to find partisans of all stripes willing to engage in dubious tactics, it does not follow, therefore, that all charges of wrongdoing are therefore equal—or equally dismissable. Greenwald’s argument here is rank relativism meant to disguise the important differences between attacks on Clinton over Kosovo and the current attacks on Bush, which I outlined in the comment I left on his site. Briefly, many conservatives supported Clinton’s decision; those who didn’t and speculated as to Clinton’s motives may or may not have been wrong (I suspect they were), but the fact is, unless they were acting in bad faith—unless, that is, they knew Clinton to be innocent of those charges but made them anyway—they were simply engaging in vulgar politics. The difference being, there was no Senate investigation into whether or not Clinton was acting on bad faith. Nor, in my opinion, should there have been.

What we are seeing now, however, is a cynical, orchestrated attempt to weaken the President—and importantly, one that is based on what most Congressional Democrats know to be a faulty premise, that Bush either “lied” or “manipulated intelligence” to take us into war.

Glenn Reynolds labeled such behavior unpatriotic. To which I responded, “Glenn touches on an important distinction that we should now be willing to embrace: namely, that though the anti-war position is not inherently unpatriotic, those in the anti-war movement who use lies and misinformation to harm the country are—and political opportunism that relies on revisionist history and the leveling of false charges in order to regain power is indicative of mindset that profoundly cynical and profoundly anti-democratic.”

I’ve heard nothing yet that would disabuse me of that assessment. But I welcome your comments.


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related; a slightly different view here.