George W. Bush's Amnesia Drives Steve Benen into Shrill Unholy Madness!

"Yeah, I can't remember" says George W. Bush. And Steve Benen's sanity is shattered beyond repair:

Talking Points Memo | "Yeah, I can't remember": By Steve Benen: Robert Draper, however, a former writer for Texas Monthly, spent hours with the president at the White House, getting Bush to open up on these subjects for an upcoming book, which Draper agreed to share with the New York Times. It led to an NYT piece today that is almost impossible to read without feeling incredibly frustrated.... This might have been the most maddening revelation:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, "The policy was to keep the army intact; didn't happen."

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush's former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army's dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, "Yeah, I can't remember, I'm sure I said, 'This is the policy, what happened?' " But, he added, "Again, Hadley's got notes on all of this stuff," referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Let's not brush past this too quickly. The disbanding of the Iraqi army was one of the biggest mistakes of an administration burdened by near-constant missteps, one that was largely responsible for the creation of an Iraqi insurgency. On the subject, Bush sounds like a confused child -- he didn't understand the decision, he's not sure how the decision was made, and asked for his reaction to the decision, Bush is left to conclude, "Yeah, I can't remember"...

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Comments

[anne]

"The disbanding of the Iraqi army was one of the biggest mistakes of an administration burdened by near-constant missteps, one that was largely responsible for the creation of an Iraqi insurgency."

Of course, this is rubbish and part of the ever evolving and scary rationale that tells us invading another country that is not a threat to us and beginning an interminable military occupation of another country is fine as long as we do it all right. The problem then becomes we did Iraq wrong. However the problem was the invasion and occupation which continues still with a $200 billion budget for the coming year telling us what is to come.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/09/lies-swayed-con.html

August 2, 2007

Lies Swayed Congressman to Support the War
Edited by Mark Thoma

Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski explains how lies were used to convince him to vote to authorize the Iraq war:

Kanjorski: Millions of people coming to the Poconos, by Howard Frank: ...The highlight of the night for many was the explanation he gave for his vote on the Iraq war in 2002.

"We were told a lot of things that were incorrect or inaccurate" he said.

Kanjorski described how, prior to the vote, he and several other representatives were ushered into the Roosevelt Room in the White House and given a 90-minute, highly classified briefing by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenant.

"They told us all kind of things. That we were under a threat and their information was as complete as possible and they (Iraq) had weapons of mass destruction" he said.

Kanjorski was not terribly impressed with the briefing. Within two hours he received a call from the White House, asking if he had any further questions. Kanjorski said he that to enter into a preemptive war, he had to be convinced the threat is imminent. And he wasn't convinced.

So he was asked to return for another briefing the next morning.

In it, he was shown large pictures of a plane "that looked like a mosquito." Kanjorski was told these were called UAVs — unmanned aeronautical vehicles, the highest black-box weapons we have, and they (the Iraqis) have 1,000 of them, and they can deliver weapons of mass destruction. That included a plane that could spray chemical and biological materials.

He was told the intelligence agency had incontrovertible evidence of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. "I'm a lawyer" he said. "Use the phrase 'incontrovertible evidence' and you've got my attention. It was impressive."

That presentation swayed him. But, he added, "the Iraqis never had one damned weapon."

"There was no way they ever took those pictures in Iraq," he said, referring to the UAVs. ... "We invaded a sovereign nation based on a lie."

Here's another report indicating he was also told 250 U.S. cities were in danger:

Kanjorski faces public, explains his Iraq vote, by Bill O'Boyle, Times Leader: ...Kanjorski walked into the fire hall at 7:05 p.m. and immediately took off his suit jacket.

"I'm sure it will get hot in here, especially when you start to yell at me," he joked. "œHow many of you are mad or angry? I am too. I can not morally justify the pre-emptive invasion of another country unless the U.S. is in imminent danger of being attacked. We got there under false pretenses and we have stayed there."

Kanjorski took the time to tell the people how he was convinced to support the war effort back in 2002. He said he was called to a meeting at the White House along with several other U.S. representatives and senators.

He said he left the meeting unsure of how he would vote, and he told the White House he was leaning toward voting against the war. "I then was invited to return to the White House the next day," Kanjorski said.

He said the group was shown photographs of stored weapons of mass destruction. He said he saw photos of UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - which are used to transport chemicals and/or hydrogen bombs. He said he was told that the Iraqis had a thousand of these and they were intending to bring them into the U.S. via both coasts, and more than 250 U.S. cities were to be targeted. "None of the information was true," Kanjorski said. ...

[anne]

He said the group was shown photographs of stored weapons of mass destruction. He said he saw photos of UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - which are used to transport chemicals and/or hydrogen bombs. He said he was told that the Iraqis had a thousand of these and they were intending to bring them into the U.S. via both coasts, and more than 250 U.S. cities were to be targeted. "None of the information was true," Kanjorski said. ...

Suddenly a crippled blockaded constantly monitored constantly bombed nation with a military budget that by our standards was non-existent is going to deliver not even atomic but hydrogen bombs to hundreds of American cities.

The insane tragedy of Iraq rests with invasion and occupation, and not in doing it right.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/09/paul-krugman-sn.html

September 3, 2007

Paul Krugman: Snow Job in the Desert
Edited by Mark Thoma

Paul Krugman wonders if the media has learned anything from its past mistakes:

NY Times: In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. ... [M]any people in the political and media establishments swooned: they admired Mr. Powell, and because he said it, they believed it.

Mr. Powell’s masters got the war they wanted, and it soon became apparent that none of his assertions had been true.

Until recently I assumed that ... a repeat of the snow job that sold the war impossible. But I was wrong. The administration, ... relying on Gen. David Petraeus to play ... Colin Powell..., has had remarkable success creating the perception that the “surge” is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.

Thus Kenneth Pollack..., author of “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” ... and ... Michael O’Hanlon, another longtime war booster, returned from a Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq and declared that the surge was working. They received enormous media coverage; most ... accepted their ludicrous self-description as critics of the war who have been convinced by new evidence.

A third participant..., Anthony Cordesman ... reported that ... he saw little change in the Iraq situation... But neither his dissent nor a courageous rebuttal of Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack by seven soldiers actually serving in Iraq ... received much media attention.

Meanwhile, many news organizations have come out with misleading reports suggesting a sharp drop in U.S. casualties. The reality is that ... every month of 2007 has seen more U.S. military fatalities than the same month in 2006.

What about civilian casualties? The Pentagon says they’re down, but it has ..[not] explained how they’re calculated. According to a draft report from the Government Accountability Office, which was leaked..., U.S. government agencies “differ” on whether sectarian violence has been reduced. And independent attempts ... to estimate civilian deaths ... have not found any significant decline...

Above all, we should remember that the whole point of the surge was to create space for political progress in Iraq. And neither that leaked G.A.O. report nor the recent National Intelligence Estimate found any political progress worth mentioning...

But, say the usual suspects, General Petraeus is a fine, upstanding officer who wouldn’t participate in a campaign of deception — apparently forgetting that they said the same thing about Mr. Powell.

First of all, General Petraeus is now identified with the surge; if it fails, he fails. He has every incentive to find a way to keep it going, in the hope that somehow he can pull off something he can call success.

And General Petraeus’s history also suggests that he is much more ... political ... than his press would have you believe. In particular, six weeks before the 2004 presidential election, General Petraeus published an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which he claimed — wrongly, of course — that there had been “tangible progress” in Iraq, and that “momentum has gathered in recent months.”

Is it normal for serving military officers to publish articles just before an election that clearly help an incumbent’s campaign? I don’t think so.

So here we go again. It appears that many influential people in this country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it.

[Sean]

Following up on the first of anne's comments, somebody, Yglesias?, made the good point that had Bremer not disbanded the army, we would have had a whole set of different intractable problems.

The mistake was going into Iraq in the first place. Disbanding or not disbanding the army wasn't going to make the problem of post-war Iraq soluble.