Political Winds

It may seem perverse to suggest that, at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback. But don’t be astonished if that is the case… Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.

What is perverse is that the so-called dean of the Washington press corps could write such patent nonsense.  David Broder is supposed to be the guy who has covered it all, a sober-minded observer who calmly takes it all in and gives us the big picture.  Except that he doesn’t - and hasn’t for a long time.  My objection to Broder usually centers on his relentless advancement of mushy conventional wisdom.  This time he challenges CW but is so wildly off-base as to border on the bizarre.  Oh yeah, David Broder, Bush is on a roll.  As the New York Times’ Frank Rich summarizes,

Congressional votes against his war policy, the Libby trial, the Pentagon inspector general’s report deploring Douglas Feith’s fictional prewar intelligence, and the new and dire National Intelligence Estimate saying that America is sending troops into the cross-fire of a multifaceted sectarian cataclysm.

Imagine if Bush weren’t “regaining the initiative.”

The revisionists are very hard at work these days. There are legions of politicians and journalist-pundits who now generously admit they were wrong to support the war in 2003 and at the same rationalize that tragic choice. You know the drill - the intelligence was flawed, just about everyone thought Saddam was a threat, etc.

John Edwards - and I like the guy - made his own disingenuous mea culpa on Meet the Press last Sunday:

MR. RUSSERT: Why were you so wrong?
SEN. EDWARDS: For the same reason a lot of people were wrong. You know, we—the intelligence information that we got was wrong. I mean, tragically wrong.

And now Joe Klein, harsh critic of triangulators, is doing his own dance. He’s currently engaged in a brouhaha with Ariana Huffington about whether or not he was really for the war before he was against it. Ariana says Joe basically was for it, and Joe says no, he was only for it in one brief moment of weakness. And in his Time blog, in talking about John McCain, Joe asserts, “I disagreed with him about going to war in 2003… ” The evidence supports Ariana, who, among other things, points to Joe’s 2003 appearance on Meet the Press:

MR. KLEIN: …This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.
RUSSERT: Now that’s twice you’ve said that: ‘It’s the right war.’ You believe it’s the wrong time. Why do you think it’s the right war?
KLEIN: Because sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. Saddam has–Saddam Hussein has to be taken out.

So Mr. Anonymous is trying to be anonymous about his previous statements about the war. And, as Russert pointed out to Edwards, there were plenty of people in 2003 who were skeptical about the administration’s claims. One was an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, whose judgment, said Russert, ” was on the money” when he made this statement in October of 2002:

I know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.