TPM Reader DS checks in …
Has anyone given serious thought to the possibility that Bush himself may not have been aware of the conflicting evidence, the caveats, etc.? I strongly suspect that Cheney and Rumsfeld presented him with one sexed-up dossier after another, each of which left out the doubts and uncertainties felt at the lower levels. And Bush would have been none the wiser. After all, it is well known that Bush doesn’t look beyond his advisors for news of the world, for corroboration, or for counterfactuals with which to test his working hypotheses. And they all knew this about him in advance. He was ripe for manipulation. And Cheney is nothing if not a manipulator. [Even Rove isn’t beneath such knavery.]
I wouldn’t be surprised if the story of the lead-up to war turns out to be the story of this cabal crafting a persuasive story, presenting it to Bush in carefully calibrated doses, and getting him to do what they had decided long in advance they wanted to do. And it was all made possible by Bush’s almost total lack of curiosity and intellectual discipline.
Disturbing, but to my mind highly plausible.
At the end of the day, I don’t find this theory persuasive. I don’t see much reason to assume that the president is any less capable of such bad-faith and bad acts than those around him. I don’t find it plausible that even in ‘the bubble’ he could really be that out of touch. And as America Abroad contributors Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay argue in their book America Unbound, there are many reasons to believe that the president’s foreign policy is not something foisted on him by others but grounded in his own philosophy about force, power and America’s place in the world.
Still, there’s way too much we don’t know about what’s happened in the last five years to make any definitive judgments. So it’s worth considering.
And I do think DS is on to something when he notes the president’s lack of seriousness about facutal information and his indifference to critically evaluating evidence or challenging his own assumptions. The president’s laziness, hubris and unwillingness to hold himself or anyone else accountable for anything will prove to have been at the heart of all of this.
