With the Senate having passed its war spending bill this afternoon, the final version of the legislation will reach the Oval Office on Tuesday — the fourth anniversary of the president’s now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech.
The speech continues to be a touchy subject for the White House. In January, Tony Snow insisted, with a straight face, that the president’s message was the “opposite” of “mission accomplished,” and the banner was the fault of the troops on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Snow, of course, was wrong about the message, and wrong about the banner.
Given this, congressional Dems, who usually don’t excel in political theater, deserve some credit for sending the spending bill to the White House on the anniversary of this humiliating memory. Not surprisingly, the Bush gang doesn’t quite see it this way. From this morning’s gaggle:
“And I think that if it is the case that they withheld money for the troops in order to try to play some ridiculous PR stunt, that that is the height of cynicism, and absolutely so unfortunate for the men and women in uniform and their families who are watching the debate — and you would hope that that is not true, although it does make you wonder, why did the House wait so long to appoint conferees?”
If the White House were really concerned about “some ridiculous PR stunt,” maybe the Bush gang can explain the USS Lincoln event in the first place. As the Boston Globe reported four years ago, “[T]he carrier was just 30 miles from shore by the time he arrived, and officials said it had slowed down so that Bush could spend the night on board before the USS Abraham Lincoln docks today, extending by one day the sailors’ almost 10-month deployment at sea, the longest by a carrier in 30 years.”
What was that Perino was saying about the height of cynicism?
The dissembling only got worse from there.
Q: Dana, on the “mission accomplished” speech, though, wasn’t the phrase something to the effect of, “the battle of Baghdad is over”? Clearly that’s not true.
PERINO: I think it was — it was major combat. And I — it was major combat operations. And at that point, if you’re going back — I’m not the greater historian on this, since I was at the Council on Environmental Quality during this episode, but Baghdad did fall very quickly. One of the things that we have learned over the years is how strong, first of all, that al Qaeda would be in Iraq, that they would set up this battle as, in their own words, the battle to win. And we did not know that their stoking of sectarian violence would do what it did last year. We had — at the end of 2005 and early 2006, you had the votes for a government and a vote for a constitution with millions of people in Iraq. And it looked like we were moving towards a period of political reconciliation. And then if you look at the marker of the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February of 2006, it really started this chain reaction, which is — then in the fall of 2006, the President heard the call of the American people who wanted to see a change in Iraq, and he underwent an extensive review, a comprehensive review which led to the new Baghdad security plan, which is now under way as General Petraeus —
Q: Four years ago he said major combat operations were over. All those things happened after he said major combat operations were over. Wasn’t that a rosy scenario?
PERINO: He said that — he also said that a transition from democracy — I’m sorry, the transition from dictatorship to democracy would take time. And — go ahead.
Q: Are you really blaming al Qaeda for the sectarian violence in Iraq?
PERINO: I think there’s multiple factors, and I think that even General Petraeus said yesterday that their whole aim — if you look at that Zarqawi to Zawahiri letter, their whole aim was to try to stoke sectarian violence. They love chaos, they want to fill the vacuum with their extremist ideology.
Q: Are you suggesting that if it wasn’t for al Qaeda, there wouldn’t be sectarian violence?
PERINO: No, I’m not suggesting that. But what we do know, and it has been established by the MNFI forces and the intelligence community, if you just look at the NIE that we released in January of 2007 that that is the consensus opinion of the national security agencies of this country.
Q: But they’re not the only ones responsible. The sectarian divisions existed before, and were exacerbated by the war.
PERINO: I don’t think that we’re — we’re not arguing that it wasn’t.
I’m glad Tony Snow is returning to the podium next week. Between Perino’s lies and Snow’s lies, the latter tends to be more entertaining.