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A word, or two, about this @Cirincione tweet I posted earlier. It was a response to a long thread by GW Bush’s longtime press secretary @AriFleischer, rejecting the idea that his boss & senior associates misled the nation into war with Iraq in 2002-3.
2. Read the Carnegie report if you’re interested in a detailed rebuttal. The political consequences of the reasoning Fleischer adopts are worth thinking about. Bush Republicans used that reasoning repeatedly, as they sought to reach the conclusion, “not my fault.”
3. 9/11 was a tragedy that just happened, not a failure for which anyone deserved to lose his job. Not killing bin Laden after 9/11 was a “fog of war” thing; it was no one’s fault. Disbanding the Iraqi army? That was just Paul Bremer acting on his own.
4. Abu Ghraib was a product of low-level misconduct, & had nothing to do with American abuse of detainees since 2001. The insurgency was the fault of “the bad guys” in Iraq, the “dead-enders.” Nor was the “Not My Fault” doctrine limited to national security disasters.
5. Exploding federal budget deficits may have been very sad, but they weren’t caused by the massive tax cuts Bush had demanded upon taking office or the wars he started and couldn’t win. Also, Katrina was a hurricane, and what are you going to do? Ditto with climate change.
6. But the Not My Fault Doctrine may have had its greatest political impact after it was applied to the 2007-08 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession. These also, in BushWorld, were events that just happened somehow. The problem, this time, was that voters noticed.
7. John McCain in 2008 & Mitt Romney in 2012 ran on slight variations of Bush’s 2004 platform; the entire question of what the Bush administration had gotten wrong in the years preceding the financial crisis was strenuously evaded. The result was a vacuum in the Party’s message.
8. The vacuum was partially filled by reflexive, bitter opposition to anything Barack Obama proposed to fight the devastating recession he had inherited from Bush. It was partially filled by ferocious pursuit of penny-ante scandals, from Benghazi to the Clinton e-mails.
9. Finally, the vacuum created by Republicans’ failure to reckon honestly with the Bush administration’s shortcomings was filled by Trump. I’ve said plenty about Trump, very little of it complimentary. But within the GOP, the alternatives to Trump all adhered to Not My Fault.
10. In retrospect, we can see why. The Bush years were a golden age for Republican careerists, who with large GOP donors were the Bush family’s most devoted constituency. Not many GOP careerists had to dodge IEDs in Iraq, and the Great Recession left them mostly unscathed.
11. The Bushes, and Dick Cheney as well, were known for looking after the people who served them. They made fortunes & reputations, and earned loyalty in return, as @AriFleischer demonstrated in his thread yesterday.
12. But their tenure in office saddled America with an enormous burden. History turns a cold eye to Not My Fault. The historical record is very clear that Bush and Cheney presented with clarity and confidence intelligence conclusions on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction...
13...that left ample room for doubt. Their determined efforts since then to blame their mistakes on subordinates in the intelligence community do not change the record. Their defenders’ rote denunciations of “The Left” for saying mean things about Bush do not change the record.
14. The record is all that matters. Screwing up in government has consequences. If shortcuts taken to facilitate disastrous policy choices stain personal reputations, as with Bush & Cheney, tough. They should have looked to their reputations while they were in government.
15. Remember Ronald Reagan’s closing argument in 1980? “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is the country?” The case that both were not after eight years of Bush is a hell of a lot clearer than it had been after four years of Jimmy Carter.
16. The Republican Party, following the example Bush set, never engaged with that case: not on Iraq, or Afghanistan, not on the economy or anything else. Its leaders still demand the public accept their spin — and spin is all it is. But you can’t spin history. [end]
Addendum to above thread: @MiekeEoyang goes into more detail about Bush administration misuse of intelligence on alleged Iraqi WMD, and Saddam Hussein’s imagine connection to al Qaeda, in this thread.
