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![]() Just Above Sunset
July 18, 2004 - WMD for Dummies
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Every time I see the columnist
Tom Oliphant on television – usually on the PBS News Hour in some endless discussion – I think he is a
very odd man. Rail-thin in his bow tie with prissy manners and precise diction
he’s a political and anorexic version of Felix Unger from The Odd Couple - the Central Casting version of an
effete liberal from Boston, on camera to provide, no doubt, a dramatic contrast to the virile, manly but simple-minded and
rather inarticulate conservative in the scene. Oliphant may, for all we know,
be the invention of some news director who loves entertaining contrasts – and just an actor playing the assigned role.
The very best that can be said on President George W. Bush's behalf is that he used the Cliffs
Notes version of intelligence information about Iraq as the basis for a poorly planned and rushed invasion of Iraq in March
of last year. The problem with this charitable approach to Bush is that it's unfair to Cliffs Notes. You see the problem and
almost hear the words from the Oval Office - “Condi, why is this guy talking about that Vegas
magician guy David Copperfield? And who is Uriah Heep - one of the bad guys over in Muslim-land? And isn’t
Dickens one of our guys in the Senate?” To try to escape accountability by blaming CIA summaries, the president would have to ask the
country to believe that he led it to war after reading a few cover pages without once glancing at the backup material that
was sent to him and his top advisers. This view of the Bush style - big picture and full of alleged moral clarity - is grounds
all by itself for electing a new president. But Tom, Bush did tell
us all he doesn’t do nuance. We WERE warned. You have to believe that in processing all of this, Bush never bothered to look beyond the summary
or to inquire in depth whether it was supported. You then have to believe that Condoleezza Rice never had her large national
security staff in the White House take a long look at the backup material on Bush's behalf. Well, Tom doesn’t
believe all this – but it could be so. Tuesday night the widely
respect CNN news guy Wolf Blitzer was interviewed on The Daily Show - and the host, Jon Stewart, asked Blitzer, in
his opinion, how the whole government, and almost all of the news media, got it all so very wrong? To return to my point about Cliffs Notes, imagine you were Bush's instructor at Yale. He has turned
in his exam, and you have noted that his assertion that David Copperfield dispatched Uriah Heep with the fireplace poker is
contradicted by Dickens's novel itself. To save his skin, Bush comes to you and claims with a straight face that he used the
Cliffs Notes version to study and that the fact he got it wrong should be ascribed to the cheat sheet, not to him. That - folks turning on
Bush for stupidly trusting a faulty cheat-sheet (WMD For Dummies) and not asking questions –
is not going to happen. Perhaps Bush’s Cliffs Notes were faulty,
and the whole mess is thus not Bush’s fault. White House has refused to release a prewar intelligence summary compiled for President Bush on
Iraq's banned weapons that Democrats said on Wednesday had given him none of the dissenting views included in more comprehensive
intelligence reports. Ah, let it go. It is far too late now to matter. We had our war and what’s
done is done. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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