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April 10, 2007Revisionist in ChiefPresident Bush keeps telling the same fairy tale: once everything was going well in Iraq, then those nasty terrorists who hate liberty and democracy blew up a mosque and all went to shit. Today he gave his latest rendition of that story: The vast majority of Iraqis have made it clear they want to live in peace. After all, about 12 million of them went to the polls [in 2005] -- a feat that was, again, unimaginable in the mid-1990s.... The terrorists, recognizing that this country was headed toward a society based upon liberty, a society based upon an ideology that is the opposite of what they believe, struck. And they struck by blowing up the Golden Mosque of Samarra [in February 2006], which is a holy shrine, a holy site. It's a site that a lot of people hold dear in their heart. And they were attempting to provoke retaliation by a segment of that society -- the Iraqi Shia. And they succeeded. And the result was a tragic escalation of violence. And in the face of the violence -- in other words, there was reprisal, people said, we're going to get even, how dare these people do this -- and in the face of this violence, I had a choice to make. See, we could withdraw our troops from the capital of Iraq and hope that violence would not spiral out of control, or we could send reinforcements into the capital in the hopes of quelling sectarian violence, in order to give this young democracy time to reconcile, time to deal, with the politics necessary for a government that can sustain itself and defend itself to emerge. Bush recounted this story in the speech he gave in January announcing his so-called surge. After that address, Anthony Cordesman, an analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and no softie), provided a devastating deconstruction of Bush's speech on The New York Times op-ed page and covered Bush's blatant revisionism. Here's a section: Bush: When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. Analysis: The elections were anything but a "stunning achievement." The system used virtually ensured that Iraqis would vote by sect and ethnicity and that the outcome would further divide Sunni Arabs and Shiites, compounding the tensions created by American efforts to make Iraqis draft a new constitution. Bush: But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq - particularly in Baghdad - overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Analysis: This statement reinvents history. The level of sectarian violence had built up steadily during 2005. The rise of sectarian and ethnic conflict was a major factor long before President Bush announced his previous strategy at the end of 2005, before the attack on one of the Shiites' holiest sites, the Golden Mosque in Samarra - an event whose importance the administration sharply played down at the time. Bush also said today there are "encouraging signs" the surge is working. But if he gets his history wrong, can he be expected to get the present right? Posted by David Corn at April 10, 2007 02:35 PM |
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"HUBRIS is a bold and provocative book that will quickly become an explosive part of the national debate on how we got involved in Iraq." --Tom Brokaw |
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