Shortly after BC04’s top campaign surrogate, Rudy Giuliani, blamed the U.S. troops for the Al Qaqaa debacle, the Bush team started looking for a way to spin out of it. Since Giuliani’s words were pretty clear, and were uttered on national television, their options were limited. They relied on the “context” angle.
Later, in a statement issued through the Bush-Cheney campaign, Giuliani accused the Democrats of taking his comments out of context.
“We don’t need someone who voted against funding our troops during war to take my remarks out of context,” Giuliani said in the statement.
Indeed, I got a couple of emails suggesting Giuliani’s comments weren’t as bad as they seemed if you saw the whole Today show segment. With that in mind, here’s the entire relevant portion of the transcript, so you can decide for yourself:
Giuliani: John Kerry wants to pretend we do know what happened [at Al Qaqaa]. We don’t know what happened. And the best possibility is, that those weapons were gone before — or explosives were gone even before the troops got there. So the–
Lauer: It’s not necessarily the best possibility. You know–
Giuliani: But — at least it’s an equal possibility. John Kerry hasn’t admitted that. Instead, John Kerry became an attack dog. He immediately began attacking the president. He immediately began saying, ‘There’s a terrible mistake. There’s a terrible’ — we don’t know if it’s a mistake or not. The president was cautious, the president was prudent, the president did what a commander in chief should do. And no matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough? We don’t know the–
Lauer: But if you are commander-in-chief you are in charge of those troops. And let’s just say — what it does, I think, doesn’t it cut to the core of the problem some people have with this president, that he doesn’t accept blame and rarely admits to a mistake?
Giuliani: No it doesn’t. Not at all. I think what it shows is, that the president is not willing to put blame on the troops when it isn’t clear that they should be blamed. Things go wrong in war. Abraham Lincoln had more things going wrong in the Civil War than probably any — any president. But you have to stick with it, you have to find out what the truth is. And the reality is, that we don’t know what happened to those explosives, and they represent a small fraction of the explosives that were destroyed. The New York Times and CBS News, who covered this story, particularly the Times in pointing this story out has never pointed out in its newspaper that 400,000 explosives like this have been destroyed by our troops since they’ve been there.
This, to me, hardly makes it better.
In one answer, Giuliani is clearly shifting responsibility away from the president and onto the troops: “[T]he actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there.” In the next answer, Giuliani explains Bush didn’t want to blame the troops and “it isn’t clear that they should be blamed.”
The context hardly makes the situation less offensive. If isn’t “clear” the troops are responsible, why did Giuliani say they bear the “actual responsibility” about 10 second before hand? If Bush isn’t willing to “put blame on the troops,” why is Giuliani anxious to do just that? Sorry, BC04, you’ll need a better spin than this nonsense.
Needless to say, there were several strong reactions to Giuliani’s comments, but two stood out for me. First, there was a mother whose son is in Iraq who was outraged.
That rankled Eleanor Kjellman of Henniker, an Air Force veteran whose son Kurt is an Army reservist in the Mideast.
”That was such a demoralizing, destructive statement for Rudolph Giuliani to make. Once again they (the troops) are scapegoats for the administration’s failures,” she said at a Democratic protest before a planned appearance by Giuliani in Bedford.
The other was Gen. Wesley Clark, who, as my friend Dave noted, was none too pleased with the former New York mayor.
“For President Bush to send Rudolph Giuliani out on television to say that the ‘actual responsibility’ for the failure to secure explosives lies with the troops is insulting and cowardly.
“The President approved the mission and the priorities. Civilian leaders tell military leaders what to do. The military follows those orders and gets the job done. This was a failure of civilian leadership, first in not telling the troops to secure explosives and other dangerous materials, and second for not providing sufficient troops and sufficient equipment for troops to do the job.
“President Bush sent our troops to war without sufficient body armor, without a sound plan and without sufficient forces to accomplish the mission. Our troops are performing a difficult mission with skill, bravery and determination. They deserve a commander in chief who supports them and understands that the buck stops in the Oval Office, not one who gets weak knees and shifts blame for his mistakes.”
Four more days.