When there’s a written transcript of someone saying something they wish they hadn’t, the person has very few choices. The responsible thing, of course, is to live up to one’s own comments and explain what they meant. If necessary, one can even apologize and admit mistake.
Or, if you’re Don Rumsfeld, you can just have the transcript changed and hope no one catches you trying to deceive the public.
The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.
At issue was a passage in Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” an account published this week of Bush’s decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could “take that to the bank” that the invasion would happen.
The comment came in a key moment in the run-up to the war, when Rumsfeld and other officials were briefing Bandar on a military plan to attack and invade Iraq, and pointing to a top-secret map that showed how the war plan would unfold. The book reports that the meeting with Bandar was held on Jan. 11, 2003, in Vice President Cheney’s West Wing office. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended.
Pentagon officials omitted the discussion of the meeting from a transcript of the Woodward interview that they posted on the Defense Department’s Web site Monday. Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he may have used the phrase “take that to the bank” but that no final decision had been made to go to war.
Rumsfeld has reached a new low, which considering the source, is pretty tough to do. He now wants to debate the meaning of “take that to the bank.” It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Rumsfeld’s defense yesterday was particularly amusing.
“To my knowledge, a decision had not been taken by the president to go to war at that meeting,” Rumsfeld said. “There was certainly nothing I said that should have suggested that, and any suggestion to the contrary would not be accurate.”
Yes, how silly of us. I can’t imagine why we would have thought otherwise. Here’s the exact quote Rumsfeld gave Woodward:
I remember meeting with the Vice President and I think [Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and I met with a foreign dignitary [Bandar] at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words at some point we had had enough of a signal from the President that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen.
Rumsfeld wants us to consider this quote and believe that he wasn’t suggesting that the president was committed to the invasion. Either he believes we’re all pathetic fools or he couldn’t come up with a better straight-face defense. Maybe it’s both.