Wednesday, December 28, 2005
And so it Continues...Part 1 Million
The Chicago Tribune’s War on Truth continues. In today’s editorial, the editors decide they are “Judging the Case for War.” There is a surprising amount of truth in their evaluation, though it is a shoddy and superficial examination. They devote 80% of their column inches to explaining all the things the administration was right about and the other 20% glossing over the sources who revealed the utter inaccuracy of the administration’s claims about Al Qaeda, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons.
The administration’s claims that the press is focusing on the negatives about Iraq are the whining, puling lies of an administration that has been caught, in front of the world, with its hand in the cookie jar. The newspaper of record in Chicago, through editorials and op-ed pieces written by loyalist republican propagandists, has given their arguments more than equal space. The New York Times has followed suit, but we’ll look into that later.
I find it curious that, while occasionally admitting that the President “exaggerated” this or that claim, the editors never the less conclude that “we do not see the conspiracy to mislead” that the administration’s critics do. Because exaggerating intelligence claims to justify a war is by definition misleading, the editors seem to conclude that the administration inadvertently misled the country.
How does one “inadvertently” exaggerate, over and over again?
This editorial reeks of intellectual cowardice. A sample of the editors torturing their prose to gingerly step around the facts: “the administration didn’t advance its arguments with equal emphasis.” That’s convoluted-speak for “WMDs were the primary justification for war.” They can’t bring themselves to say it in plain language.
And then come the lies. While admitting the administration’s claims of WMDs were “flat-out wrong” they conclude “There was no need for the administration to rely on risky intelligence to chronicle many of Iraq’s other sins. In putting so much emphasis on illicit weaponry, the White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed.”
In other words, he didn’t have to lie. That doesn’t change the fact that he did. Although 57% of people believe the war could be justified without WMDs (MSNBC poll here), and two-thirds believed that in the summer of 2003 (Zogby poll here), the administration was able to use bad intelligence to force the UN to step up the pressure on Saddam Hussein and to ameliorate the negative reaction from the rest of the world that overwhelmingly disapproved of the invasion. Those lies also took some people off of the fence and got them behind the president. Those lies were useful.
And the WMD argument was not the only one in which the Tribune acknowledges the president exaggerated. Iraq’s “alliance” with terrorists was also manufactured, leading the editors to conclude that “the White House exaggerated this argument for war.”
This argument, and the chemical weapons argument, and the nuclear weapons argument. There’s a whole lotta “accidental” exaggeration going on.
In truth, if you examine the evidence more closely, “exaggeration” doesn’t describe it. The rancid information from known liars the administration unabashedly touted as leaving “no doubt” is so fetid as to curl the nose of any person who reads it who doesn’t already have an agenda. See my previous post “The Big Lie” for a rundown of this fetid collection of data, and a little more the following day in the post “And so it Continues…Part Deux.” That’s December 13th and 14th, on my blog.
The editors also raise Hussein’s human rights violations as a justification for invasion, an argument I have debunked more than once before. George H.W. Bush lifted sanctions on Iraq in 1989 after Hussein had committed those atrocities. Although the Tribune rails against the UN sanctions against Iraq as “toothless,” they do not mention the behavior of our own government. They also don’t mention the fact that the US government and private companies gave Hussein chemical weapon supplies in the eighties, as the New York Times described in an article in August of 2002. Oh, but the rest of the world, yeah, they were just in bed with Saddam.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:58 PM 
