November 15, 2005
Bush's Credibility Problems
By E.
J. Dionne Jr.
WASHINGTON -- Mr. President, it won't work this time.
With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent
of Americans agreeing that George W. Bush ``deliberately misled
people to make the case for war with Iraq,'' the president clearly
needs to tend to his credibility problems. But his partisan attacks
on the administration's critics in a Veterans Day speech last
week will only add to his troubles.
Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration
of having ``manipulated the intelligence and misled the American
people'' was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. ``These baseless
attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that
is questioning America's will,'' Bush declared. ``As our troops
fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life,
they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send
them to war continue to stand behind them.''
You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the
Valerie Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our
troops and our enemy by daring to indict Scooter Libby for perjury
and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our troops
desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the administration?
There is a great missing element in the argument over whether
the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to
talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress
to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected
the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan
purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the
post-9/11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from
raising questions more of them should have raised.
The big difference between our current president and his father
is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Gulf
War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one
of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress
has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush
was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.
The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress
for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed
in October.
Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is no dove, warned of
rushing ``pell-mell'' into an endorsement of broad war powers
for the president. The Los Angeles Times reported that
Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, protested in September:
``We're being asked to go to war, and vote on it in a matter of
days. We need an intelligence estimate before we can seriously
vote.'' And Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, put it plainly:
``This will be one of the most important decisions Congress makes
in a number of years; I do not believe it should be made in the
frenzy of an election year.'' But it was.
Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap partisan attacks.
In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against
Democrat John Arthur Smith declaring: ``While Smith 'reflects'
on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering
over a U.S. city still remains.'' Note that Smith wasn't being
attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God
forbid that any Democrat dare even to think before going
to war.
Marc Racicot, the Republican National Committee chairman, said
this about the late Sen. Paul Wellstone's opposition to the war
resolution: ``He has set about to diminish the capacity of this
nation to defend itself. That is a legitimate issue.'' Wellstone,
who died in plane crash a few days before the election, was not
intimidated. But other Democrats were.
The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants
to say that the ``more than a hundred Democrats in the House and
Senate'' who ``voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power''
thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence
forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced
the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed
the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone
who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election,
that they were soft on Saddam.
By linking the war on terror to a partisan war against Democrats,
Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And
by resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded
us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
