July 10, 2004

Stephen Hayes Unmasks Sen. Levin

Demagoguery apparently just isn't what it used to be. When an influential senator distorts the past claims and statements of the president and administration officials these days, he can count on bloggers and a few exceptional print journalists to hold him to account for his words, including those from one month or one year ago. And of course there's the historical record of actual administration statements.

Lots of American citizens never knew, or don't remember exactly what Bush and Rice and Cheney and Powell said 2-3 years ago about the nature of the relationships and links between Saddam's Iraq and terrorist organizations including Al Qaeda and the possibility of their involvement in the 9/11 attacks. So Sen. Carl Levin and other designated Democratic mouthpieces try to fill that void with distortions and politically motivated propaganda.

So Stephen Hayes reminds us what they all said. And the evidence is revealing about who is misleading whom:

Levin's continuing attempt to discredit the administration on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is meeting resistance from unexpected quarters. The New York Times's Thom Shanker reported on the connection on June 25, 2004. Shanker wrote about an Iraqi Intelligence document discussing potential Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration in Saudi Arabia.

Among the stunning revelations in the document: bin Laden "requested joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia; that Iraqi Intelligence officials sought to maintain the "relationship" after bin Laden left Sudan; that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

Those words--"joint operations" and "the relationship" and "cooperation"--come not from the Bush administration, but from Iraqi intelligence. They expand on our understanding of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection and, if anything, suggest that the Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community may have actually understated the relationship.

Levin's preemptive report is indeed revealing, but not in the way he intends. We have a much clearer picture of who, exactly, is exaggerating intelligence to score political points.

UPDATE 7/10: Speaking of remembering what people said way back when, Hayes follows up with another Weekly Standard piece, this time comparing older John Edwards quotes in support of the Iraq liberation to more recent statements about "needless" war. From an appearance on Harball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: Were we right to go to this war alone, basically without the Europeans behind us? Was that something we had to do?

EDWARDS: I think that we were right to go. I think we were right to go to the
United Nations. I think we couldn't let those who could veto in the Security Council hold us hostage. And I think Saddam Hussein being gone is good. Good for the American people, good for the security of that region of the world, and good for the Iraqi people.

MATTHEWS: If you think the decision, which was made by the president, when basically he saw the French weren't with us and the Germans and the Russians weren't with us, was he right to say, "We're going anyway"?

EDWARDS: I stand behind my support of that, yes.

Does Edwards still believe that he wasn't "misled"? That the Iraq war was a necessary component of the broader war on terror? That President Bush was right to refuse to be held "hostage" by the U.N.?

Judging from remarks he made in his first full day as a candidate for vice president, the answer to questions two and three is "no."

"With John Kerry as president of the United States no young American will ever go to war needlessly because America has decided to go it alone."

How long will it take Edwards to claim that he, too, was "misled" by the Bush administration?

Posted by dan at July 10, 2004 12:00 AM
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