What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-fallows/what-bush-isn...

James Fallows-Huffington Post

11.14.2005

What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq


......It probably won't happen.On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.

Someone who does recognize that distinction is Donald Rumsfeld, who raised exactly this concern in the famous leaked memo of two years ago warning that the United States might be creating terrorists even faster than it was killing them. But Rumsfeld has locked himself into permanent wise-guy mode, and it is hard to imagine him sitting still for a question long enough to answer it seriously.

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So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.........