Getting Bush right

Gen. Wesley Clark says, in an interview with Amy Goodman, that the Bush administration had already decided ten days after 9/11 to invade Iraq, and a few weeks later had drawn up plans for war with seven different countries over a five year period:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a replay in what happened in the lead-up to the war with Iraq -- the allegations of the weapons of mass destruction, the media leaping onto the bandwagon?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, in a way. But, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself exactly twice. What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn’t be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran.

I knew why, because I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” -- meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office -- “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”

What's really been frustrating about the Bush era, to me, is that it seemed like all the information you needed to know that these people were incompetent, dishonest ideologues who had been bent on war with Iraq for over a decade was available from way before Bush even took office. And yet, reporters, the group of people allegedly most qualified to find that information, spent years portraying Bush first as a likable aw-shucks guy who was surrounded by Very Serious Advisers, and then as a steely-jawed, capable commander boldly leading his country in a necessary direction.

Much has been made of the fact that people who were right about the war don't get enough credit. Personally, I think that's even truer of people who were right about George W. Bush. We endured years of being mocked as extremist, knee-jerk "Bush haters" even in the mainstream press. But we were right, and they had blinders on, and now that that's widely understood, we deserve an apology.

Not that I'm waiting up nights for one.