Bristling bipartisanship

Well the sound machine is up and running in full-throated, orchestrated fury.

First there was Pod the Elder, amply quoted by the various Keyboard Kommandos (and amply rebutted here and here).

Now comes the administration's big guns. First, the otherwise demure and restrained Stephen Hadley is aghast that those who once thought Saddam might be a threat are now opposed to our empire-building adventures now collapsing in Iraq.

The White House went on the offensive in the debate over the Iraq war yesterday, insisting that U.S. intelligence had compiled a "very strong case" that Saddam Hussein harbored banned weapons and accusing congressional critics of hypocrisy because many of them voted for force three years ago.

Bristling from fresh assaults on its justification for war, the White House dispatched national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to the briefing room to issue a rebuttal to "the notion that somehow the administration manipulated prewar intelligence about Iraq." The administration's judgment on the threat posed by Iraq, he said, "represented the collective view of the intelligence community" and was "shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

And Dear Leader, his polls now sinking low enough that he may indeed strike oil, is "forcefully"...um...doing what, exactly?

TOBYHANNA, Pa. -- President Bush forcefully attacked critics of the war in Iraq on Friday, accusing them of trying to rewrite history and saying they are undercutting American forces on the front lines.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," the president said in his combative Veterans Day speech.

Defending the march to war, Bush said that foreign intelligence services and Democrats and Republicans alike were convinced at the time that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and mislead the American people about why we went to war," Bush said.

He said those critics have made those allegations although they know that a Senate investigation "found no evidence" of political pressure to change the intelligence community's assessments related to Saddam's weapons program.

He said they also know that the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing Saddam's development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

"More than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said.

Ahem. While the Robb Silberman report whitewashed...I mean...found no evidence of intelligence community pressure, it ignored the fact that any dissenting evidence was not presented to Congress and certainly not to the American people, who were told of the candlelight dinners of Saddam and Osama, of mushroom clouds as smoking guns, etc. The UN passed a great many resolutions, but it might be noted that there are no UN troops in Iraq since the U.S. decided to not ask for a vote on using force that they would have lost. And Congress was manipulated into voting its resolutions (backing the president to use force, not to "remove Saddam Hussein from power," specifically) in a marketing effort designed to force them to vote on the resolution in advance of the 2002 mid-terms rather than postponing the debate so that the next Congress could take up the debate to go to war when there would be less politics and more time.

But what I find so interesting about all of this is how furiously the administration and its abologistas are now essentially shrieking, "Yes, this was a fuckup of massive proportions, but it's not our fault. Clinton thought so, too."

No, Senor, this is your war. You used 9-11-01 to create a rationale for a war you were itching for in 2000 (and your senior advisors had been itching for for a decade). You used your war in Iraq to beat down the Democrats in the Congressional races of 2002, and you used it to undermine John Kerry's national security bona fides in 2004. You hung "Operation Iraqi Freedom" around your neck like a victory wreath, you ain't taking it off now that the flowers are dead and reeking.