May 6, 2007 – Correntewire.com – Oy.
No, it was worse than that.
Oh, Vey esmer is what I should have said, which translates roughly as "Woe is me," in the Greek Tragedy sense of that phrase, so let me try again.
Woe is us, woe is ours, and woe will we be until we lift the curse under which our democracy curentely operates, of our right-leaning corporate journalistic establishment.
George Tenet and his new book explaining his central role in the biggest foreign policy cock-up in American history is one strand in what should have been, and still should be, the biggest political story since the dawn of the cold war.
Like so many others of the beltway heavyweights, Russert managed not ask any number of meaningful questions which could have begun to elucidate this larger story, but he did manage to cover all the ground that had been covered last weekend by all the other Sunday gasbags.
If this boring meaningless interview had any virtue, it was as an illustration of why our SCLM
has been unable to wrap its collective mind around what has really been going on since Bush stole the Presidency out from under the nose of Al Gore and the entire American journalistic establishment.
The world in which this morning’s conversation between Tim and George took place is not the same world that you and I live in, the one in which it has been shown six ways from Sunday how this administration, starting at the very top, with the President and Vice-President, saw 9/11 as a prime opportunity to go to war, for largely political reasons, and by political I mean in the sense of enhancing their own hold on power.
Iraq was an obvious choice because this President had come to office with the thought that he would take down Saddam, and his Vice-President had signed a letter in 1998, urging the Clinton administration to invade Iraq.
It isn’t the world in which the Downing Street memos showed the degree to which the British were aware of the deliberate massaging of intelligence to support what Bush had already decided he was going to do. It isn’t the world in which the IAEA needed what seemed like mere hours to confirm that the documents meant to prove Iraq’s possible acquisition of uranium from Niger were forgeries.
Thus, when Tenet claimed that everyone believed Saddam had WMD, everyone everywhere, around the world, including “our partners,” presumably Great Britain, no mention was made by Russert of those memos from No. 10.
Amazingly, the entire discussion of Iraq, the runup to the invasion, the aftermath, whether, in hindsight, it has turned out to be a bad idea, took place in a world in which the global war on terror never existed, and still doesn’t. Does anyone else find it odd that Afghanistan was barely, if ever, mentioned?
What about the argument advanced by many Democrats that the haste to invade Iraq took our attention away from the far more real threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and from pursuing not merely Bin Laden but the Taliban, and from doing the kind of stabilizing of Afghanistan which we had failed to even consider doing after the Soviets left, a failure which laid the groundwork for the Taliban and its tolerance for Al Queda, and the second failure of which appears to be having the same outcome? Of course in Russert’s world of the Beltway 500, otherwise known as “our betters,” Democrats don’t exist either, not really, not in the sense that anyone should need to remember any of their critiques of Bush policies; why bother when you can always depend on Republicans to tell you what Democrats are saying and meaning.