Yet more examples from our search for Bush administration ‘disappeared’ government info.
Despite a civil war and mounting body counts on all sides, the National Review folks can still find good news coming out of Iraq. Too bad it’s over a year old and of questionable provenance.
Woodward’s latest in WaPo …
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”
In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.
The interview was embargoed until after Ford’s death.
Ask not for whom the revolving door turns: Shell Oil hires former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
I know we’re all in year end mode at the moment. So I wanted to let you know about a discussion we’ve got going over at the TPMCafe’s Coffee House blog. I started the conversation back on the 26th by asking whether there was any single galvanizing event that led to the remarkable turnaround in the president’s and the Republican party’s fortunes over the last two years. So far we’ve got answers from Ed Kilgore, E.J. Graff, Mark Schmitt, Jo-Ann Mort, and Todd Gitlin. Join us.
Gates lacking the urge to surge? This is interesting. In yesterday’s New York Sun, Eli Lake reports that Sec Def Robert Gates is actually quietly opposing President Bush’s plan to escalate the conflict by adding 30,000 to 50,000 more troops to crush the Mahdi Army and other Shi’a militias in and around Baghdad.
This would hardly be surprising, if true, since Gates, as recently as November, was a member of the Iraq Study Group and clearly on board with its policy of — albeit slow — disengagement.
One question is why we’re not seeing more made of this in the big dailies. One clue is certainly the reporter himself. Lake (who, full disclosure, is a good friend of mine, though we haven’t spoken in some time) is quite tied in with and has excellent sources among DC neocons. If those folks are trying to push back against Gates’ resistance, Eli would know about it and as a reporter he’d be interested in these policy cleavages.
But again, why no more of this in the other dailies? As I alluded to above, we could infer what Eli is telling us even in the absence of his reporting. Gates is either not in favor of the troop build-up or he is guilty of one of the great flip-flops in recent DC history. Where is he on this? Is he going along with a policy that the last year of study of the situation has actually convinced him is bound to fail. Is he silently trying to upend the policy from the inside? Certainly the Post and Times reporters can tell us more on this, right?
MSNBC helpfully reminds viewers that John Edwards is battling poverty even though he’s very, very rich.
TPM Reader JM on Bush’s fall. And no, JM is not “Josh Marshall”, no internal sock-puppetry here …
I’m glad someone pointed out that Bush’s downward trend started significantly before Katrina last year. It’s my belief that the stunning unpopularity of Bush’s Social Security scheme was what really instigated his fall, by showing just how ineffective, tone-deaf and weak he could be. (Of course Iraq was rapidly doing the same thing.)
Before the Social Security debacle, Bush had an air of inevitibility about him. All of his major proposals had passed Congress. Yet the privatization push showed him giving an ardent sales job for something no one wanted – a classic Republican idea that was so bad the Republican Congress never got to first base in enacting it. But they wasted enough time on it that Bush and the Congress never accomplished anything this term. It all came to a head during the summer recess of ’05, before Katrina. Blood was in the water.
Katrina ensured Bush’s destruction. But when it hit, his politcal levy was already compromised.
Obviously, I have something of an attachment to this issue. But I think it’s an greatly underestimated factor in what happened over the last two years. Also, the DeLay Rule. This operates on many levels. And the degree to which it put the public on notice of how out-of-touch and how much of an extremist Bush was was a very big deal. But it also showed that Bush could be beaten and beaten badly on a proposal he put all of his resources behind. A lot of Bush’s strength by early 2005 was based on the fact that he’d put his mind to pushing through a series of not-very-popular proposals that he really shouldn’t have been able to get through. But he did. That created a vicious (or virtuous, depending on your viewpoint) cycle in which he was able to maintain greater and greater degrees of party loyalty on the Hill. Party loyalty allowed him to push stuff through successfully. And his repeated successes enabled greater and greater levels of party loyalty. Both fed on each other.
All political power is unitary. You don’t lose it in one sphere and not lose it in another. In addition to what it showed the public, the Social Security debacle showed Bush’s fellow Republicans that he was beatable (and thus that he couldn’t protect them) and the press that he was a loser. The Social Security battle showed everyone that Bush wasn’t as strong or as tough as he looked.
Bill Bennett: Ford cowardly for embargoing anti-Iraq war views until after his death.