The media is picking up on Niger-gate nicely, realizing that the administration is having trouble even coming up with a basic defense for the president’s multiple misstatements.
The White House is clearly unaccustomed to playing defense. From the looks of it, I’d say they aren’t very good at it.
Let’s start with Bush’s four-question press conference yesterday in South Africa. One American journalist asked if the president had any “regret” for using the false claim about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger.
Bush responded that “there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace.” That’s fine, but it certainly doesn’t answer the question. He added, “There’s going to be a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that, but I am absolutely confident in the decision I made.”
Bush can be as confident as he wants, but it’s not his critics who are trying to “rewrite history,” it’s his White House. In psychology, I think they call this “projecting.”
I mean, really, who exactly is looking back with rose-colored glasses here? Bush said Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. That turned out to be false. He and others in the administration said Iraq was either on the verge of having a reconstituted nuclear weapons program or already had them. Also false. Bush said Iraq had ties to Al Queda. False again. The White House said Iraq had amassed huge stock piles of chemical and biological weapons, which could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order from Hussein. We know most of this is false, and perhaps all of it is. Bush’s Defense Secretary said the administration knew where Iraq’s WMD are. Profoundly false. Even after the war, Bush said “we found” Iraqi WMD, which also turned out to be false.
No matter what your partisan ideology may be, it’s not unreasonable for Bush’s critics to start wondering how and why the administration has said so many things that simply aren’t true. Bush’s defense — that we’re trying to “rewrite history” — is a fairly pathetic response to serious questions that deserve answers.
Of course, Bush wasn’t the only one with some rhetorical doozies yesterday. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer had a couple of his own.
The New York Times reported that Fleischer began trying to undermine the credibility of the report from Joseph Wilson, who as you know, was a former ambassador to several African countries and was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate the uranium story.
“[Wislon] spent eight days in Niger and concluded that Niger denied the allegation,” Fleischer said. “Well, typically nations don’t admit to going around nuclear nonproliferation.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wilson did a lot more than just conclude that Niger “denied the allegation.” His report explained why the sale couldn’t have happened, not just Niger’s denial. As Josh Marshall put it, “Fleischer is lying — there’s no other way to describe it — about what Wilson’s report said to make it seem less significant than it was. If Fleischer had said Wilson’s reasoning was flawed or his investigation incomplete, then you could say he was spinning or distorting. But saying [Wislon] said something completely different from what he said means [Fleischer’s] lying.”
When the administration starts offering demonstrable lies, you know they’re getting nervous. The last time the White House started feeling heat like this, they changed the national conversation by setting the stage for a war with Iraq. (Memo to Iran and Syria: start worrying)
While it’s nice to have caught the White House in a blatant lie like this, this wasn’t even my favorite Fleischer quote of the day.
“I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for that we’re still confident we’ll find,” Fleischer said. “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”
Yes, that quote is accurate. This is absurd to a breathtaking degree. It strikes me as the kind of thing a child might say.
I just can’t get over it. Read it again: “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”
So, those who questioned the existence of the WMD are supposed to tell people where the WMD are. And the administration who guaranteed that the WMD existed, but now can’t find them, shouldn’t have the burden of proof anymore, the administration’s critics should.
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.