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Jewish World Review Nov. 11, 2005 / 9 Mar-Cheshvan, 5766 The gullible party By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Getting suckered usually is not a sign of good judgment. On the
contrary, it's something to be embarrassed by. But Democrats are
making the contention that they were told lies prior to the Iraq
War, and believed them, central to their party's identity.
They are caught between their base's conviction that President
Bush lied about Iraq and the fact that the cream of the party voted
to authorize the war. Nearly every Democratic senator who has higher
ambitions voted "yes" — Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, John
Kerry and John Edwards. If Bush lied, it stands to reason that they
are all naifs, foolishly drawn to the seductions of a charlatan.
They aren't statesmen; they're victims.
Some of the "aye" votes make this argument themselves. "He
misled every one of us," Sen. Kerry charges. Sen. Fritz Hollings of
South Carolina, since retired, agrees: "We were misled." The
talented New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who voted for the war in the
House, explains, "If you believe that people like me and [Sens.]
Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton drew the wrong conclusion at the
time, well, that's true of a lot of Americans who were deceived by
this president."
Surely, however, these Democrats don't rely on Bush exclusively
for their information. In a demolition of the Bush-lied argument in
the current issue of Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz recalls
the other players who warned of Saddam Hussein's WMD. Democrats
could have consulted Bill Clinton, who had talked of the "threat
posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program." They could
have read the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that maintained
"Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical,
biological, nuclear and missile programs." They could have asked the
State Department, which believed Saddam had chemical and biological
weapons. They could have listened to former U.N. weapons inspectors,
a group of whom said in the presence of Iraq expert Kenneth Pollack
in 2002 that they all believed Iraq had WMD.
The Democratic "aye" votes contend they were further misled
because they assumed that Bush would carry out the war competently.
This is another way of saying that they thought it would go
smoothly. But Bush said the war might be difficult. Democrats were
free to believe this admonition and conclude that the war was too
risky. Pro-war vote Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia complains
that we thought "we could be welcomed as liberators," but it turns
out that "we don't know anything about the Middle East." Did he
believe in 2002 that we were soaked in a nuanced knowledge of the
Middle East? And what precisely did Bush say to convince him of
that?
When Democrats claim they were duped, they are sidestepping an
inconvenient truth: Many of them supported the war for the same
reasons as the president. We now know Saddam didn't have WMD
stockpiles, but the only reason we know it with any certainty is
that we crushed his regime. To pretend that, absent Bush's
deceptions, everyone would have known with exactitude the reduced
state of Saddam's weapons programs is juvenile and contemptible,
especially from Democrats who want to shimmy their way out of their
pro-war votes.
This is where the Howard Dean Democrats deserve a glimmer of
admiration. They were against the war, period. Even when things seem
to go well in Iraq, they hold firm. Dean was unswayed by the capture
of Saddam two years ago. They don't sully themselves with
after-the-fact rationalizations and evasions, and have the courage
of their paranoid and wrongheaded convictions.
But their drumbeat of "Bush lied" puts their party's leaders in
a bind. If Bush was a misleader, many top Democrats were misleadees.
Dick Polman, a political reporter for Knight-Ridder News, reminds us
that Republican George Romney damaged his presidential bid in 1968
by claiming he had been deceived by the military into supporting the
Vietnam War. Voters weren't looking for a president who could, by
his own account, be easily misled. Gullibility is not a leadership
trait.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
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