On Iraq Bush ignored Reagan dictum

07 March 2010 |permalink | email article

Karl Rove’s new memoir, to be published Tuesday, suggests that President Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq had he known there were no unconventional weapons there. He adds: “So then, did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not,” his chief strategist insists.

Rove, known as “Bush’s brain,” falls on his sword while admitting responsibility for the lack of a full-scale response to the damaging allegations which became a “poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency.”

He tries, without convincing evidence, to assert that Bush would have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about “regime change, and deal with Iraq’s horrendous human rights violations.”

In a remarkable exchange last week on MSNBC, liberal Democrat Bob Shrum and arch conservative Pat Buchanan – often at odds politically – each attacked Rove’s spin, while questioning its validity.

Buchanan, a former Republican presidential candidate, suggested that a decision to go to war against Iraq was made by neocons in the Bush administration early on, which is to say before the 9/11 attack.

Shrum, a gifted presidential speech writer who was very close to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, went further by suggesting that the White House deliberately mislead the nation, leading to the deaths of more than of 5,000 Americans in Iraq when the real war was in Afghanistan.

What rebuts the Bush “lie us into war” question which so unnerved Rove as a strategist is that the neocons, encouraged by Dick Cheney, and in their obsession to make Iraq the lone democracy in the Middle East, ignored Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum: “trust but verify.” 

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