Painted Into A Corner

In last Saturday's Washington Post, veteran reporters Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus do their best to pick apart President Bush's Veterans' Day thesis that Democrats who are now trying to rewrite history had access to the very same intelligence that he had and by their vote, arrived at the same conclusions.

For example, Milbank and Pincus note that Senators did not have the president's daily briefings. Well, that argument is absurd on its face but falls completely apart in light of the Sentate Intelligence Committee's findings that the intelligence that the senators saw was actually less strident that Bush's, meaning that they drew their conclusions from less alarmist distillations.

As Chris Wallace noted in his Sunday interview with the ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee: WALLACE: OK. Senator Rockefeller, the president says that Democratic critics, like you, looked at pre-war intelligence and came to the same conclusion that he did.

In fact, looking back at the speech that you gave in October of 2002 in which you authorized the use of force, you went further than the president ever did. Let's watch:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROCKEFELLER: I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11th that question is increasingly outdated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Now, the president never said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. As you saw, you did say that. If anyone hyped the intelligence, isn't it Jay Rockefeller?

Christopher Hitchens makes another point. According to Milbank and Pincus, who are obviously following marching orders and repeating arguments handed them by the Democrat Party make fools of themselves and their puppet masters with this line: "But in trying to set the record straight, [Bush] asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power."

Hitchens then issues the following challenge: A prize, then, for investigative courage, to Milbank and Pincus. They have identified the same problem, though this time upside down, as that which arose from the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, during the Clinton-Gore administration, in 1998. That legislation—which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote—did expressly call for the removal of Saddam Hussein but did not actually mention the use of direct U.S. military force.

Let us suppose, then, that we can find a senator who voted for the 1998 act to remove Saddam Hussein yet did not anticipate that it might entail the use of force, and who later voted for the 2002 resolution and did not appreciate that the authorization of force would entail the removal of Saddam Hussein! Would this senator kindly stand up and take a bow? He or she embodies all the moral and intellectual force of the anti-war movement. And don't be bashful, ladies and gentlemen of the "shocked, shocked" faction, we already know who you are."

Bingo. Pink mist, as they say.