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Thursday, May 29, 2008
McClellan’s shocking revelation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A shocking revelation! An American President made the decision to sell his distant goals for peace in the Middle East by focusing on the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to accounts of the tell-all book by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan.
If true — and we’ll have to wait for a more balanced historical accounting that includes first-hand accounts of the actual participants in decision-makingto know whether Bush serving future generations, as I believe, or settling an old score for his dad, as the loopy-left believes — the news is hardly indictable.
If marketing to the American people a policy that the President believes is in the country’s best interest is a crime, we’d have to dig up and indict an awful lot former presidents — FDR on lend-lease, for example. McClellan doesn’t believe, however, that Bush was intentionally deceptive. “I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.”
The White House, obviously stung by the betrayal, called McClellan’s tell-all sour grapes. “Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” said Dana Perino, the current press secretary. “We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.”
He was eased out earlier than he’d planned to leave and was apparently embittered that he was kept out of the loop on key policy decisions — not a good policy, incidentally, for any president, governor or other chief executive who has to sell his policies and ideas to a mass audience.
McClellan also indicts the media for “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war.” He said Bush made the decision by early 2002 or earlier — the terrorist attack on America was Sept. 11, 2001 — though the actual war in Iraq was not launched until March 19, 2003. The President’s primary reason was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom, ” according to press accounts of the book. Bush and key advisers made “a marketing choice,” he said, to downplay that view in favor of the weapons of mass destruction threat. Bush and others made “the WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were,” said he.
The anti-war left will feel vindicated. I’ll wait for a more balanced view — and the memoirs of the President and those who were actually in the meetings and heard the intelligence. I’m not a fan of kiss-and-tell people or their books — especially when their disloyalty comes in a time of war. And for credible second-guessers on national security, public policy, executive management and leadership, I’ll turn to somebody above the pay grade of press secretary.
