Oops. This time it'
s Colin Powell. That carries a little more weight than some of the others. Of course, technically he just said he argued for more troops, but this can't make Rummy look good.
From that article:
""I made the case to General (Tommy) Franks, to (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and to the president that I was not sure we had enough troops," Powell said. But he said the military leaders felt they had the appropriate number."
In other words, it was other generals, and not Rumsfeld, whom Powell attributes the troop level decision to. So why is this supposed to make Rumsfeld look bad?
It also gets back to the problem with this sort of criticism, which is that it's easy to want more troops, it's much harder to figure out exactly how to do that without overstretching. Powell doesn't say he had a plan for that - he didn't have to, he wasn't part of the Pentagon anymore. But without such a plan in hand, how can you tell the difference between what Powell thought we should ideally have and what we could have done practically? We can't, really, which means his statements don't have a whole lot of significance.
And to add more fuel to the fire, a
former CIA analyist accused Rumsfeld of lying. Interestingly this article does not include the interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN where McGovern flat out said that there were memos that said Bush knew there were no WMDs before the Iraq invasion. It just keeps getting worse and worse for Bushco.
Does it? Seems like they're just recycling criticisms and calling them new.
McGovern has been on Bush's case for a long time. Here's an interview he gave a while ago, back in Feb. 2004:
http://www.nathancallahan.com/mcgovern.html
Here's what he had to say about Tenet's career prospects:
"I think that Tenet will be around at least through the election," McGovern says. "There are two reasons for this. They're the same two reasons that kept him around after September 11, 2001."
Tenet left the CIA before the election, so McGovern's prediction was off. Only one prediction, no big deal if it was wrong, right? Well, let's look at WHY he made that prediction:
“George Tenet no doubt has a little computer disc with the 27 or so warnings that he gave the president starting in spring and going right up until September 2001," says McGovern. "The president and his advisors in the White House, knowing this, didn’t dismiss Tenet after 911 because it was too much of a risk. Were they to have dismissed Tenet on September 12, they could not have been sure that he wouldn’t have said, ‘Wait a second. Let me print off some of these warnings. Let me show you what I told the president in the president’s daily brief on August 6, 2001.’ So that’s reason number one."
But we HAVE seen most of the PDB from August 6, 2001, and it was released by the whitehouse only two months after McGovern's interview. And it wasn't really very damning at all: it had warnings, but nothing actionable. It was not the smoking gun Bush critics had expected. So he's basically convinced himself of a conspiracy that now appears to have not existed. So why should we trust him about his current claims that there are documents proving that Bush lied? Seems more likely to me that McGovern is engaging in wishful thinking, believing that documents he hasn't seen MUST contain certain information because that's how he believes the world works.
And how does McGovern think the world works? Well, that too is a warning bell for me:
"And I would simply add, not as an afterthought, but as a core part of this whole calculus, that this war was fought as much for Israeli strategic objectives as it was for American strategic objectives. As a matter of fact, the people running our policy toward Iraq have great difficulty distinguishing between the two."
As McGovern is speaking, I notice a slight rise in the pitch of his voice — an almost imperceptible quarter step jump.
“If I’m sounding a little angry here,” he says, “there’s no word to describe it."
There's a silence.
Yeah, I bet there's silence. McGovern exposed himself as a loon, and the interviewer doesn't quite know what to make of it. He's accusing people in government of being traitors basically because they're Jewish.
And he keeps digging:
“I don’t call them neo-conservatives," he says, "because I’m conservative. I call them neo-fascists, because that’s what they are. And what these neo-fascists did was see 911 as a golden opportunity.”
...
McGovern draws a parallel between 911 and the Reichstag fire. After claiming that the Communists committed arson, Hitler used the incident to declare a state of emergency and suspend some of the constitutionally protected personal freedoms of German citizens. These rights included freedom of speech and assembly.
And now, for one final example of McGovern's fuzzy thinking, and inability to separate his own political feelings from actual rational thought:
"It’s really remarkable," McGovern says. "People like Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent and it’s embarrassing how they scratch their heads and they say ‘I don’t know what makes a suicide bomber. I don’t know what makes people do that.’
“Well, if he watched Al Jazeera for a couple of nights. If he watched Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinians homes and he saw Israelis shooting up Palestinians in the occupied territories, then maybe he would get some sense as to why people of Palestinian or Arab or Islamic heritage – why they might look askance at the one country that they know makes this all possible. That’s the United States of America.”
But that's actually two separate questions. Suicide bombing is a peculiar institution, and nothing that McGovern cites in any way illuminates why anyone does it. He can't understand that why they target us is a different question from why they are willing to blow themselves up in the first place, and has convinced himself that the answer to the second question somehow answers the first one too. But it doesn't, and never has. Whatever McGovern's area of expertise is, it sure as hell isn't Islamic terrorism.
So back to your original point: is it really getting worse and worse for Bushco? Maybe. Public relations is a funny business, and I don't really know how well these accusations will stick. What I DO know, though, is that McGovern isn't a critic I would rely upon for anything approaching balanced or even rational criticism, and that the press is attaching themselves to what he says because they like his message and think they can pass him off as believable, not because of any inherent truth or credibility he has. Hell, I doubt they care.
