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February 8, 2004
Meet the Credibility Gap
President Bush's appearance on Meet the Press this morning to defend bringing the nation to war didn't do much to fix the credibility gap that has become a defining trait of his tenure. As you can see from the transcript, he argued that although Iraq lacked the WMD he thought they had, the war was still worth the 530 American lives it has cost. Over and again, he insisted to Tim Russert that he made the best decision that he could with the intelligence he had. But it seems to me that Bush is relying on a glaring inconsistency to make his case: he says Iraq was an imminent threat and he decided to go to war based on the intelligence provided to him by the CIA, but the CIA never said Saddam was an imminent threat.
The CIA consistently reported to the President that its data was inconclusive, and it could not report with certainty the status of WMD in Iraq, and yet every time Bush or Cheney or other underlings addressed the country (or the UN) during the march to war, they used words like "proof," "urgent," "grave," and "know." It's disingenuous of the President to continue to say he made his decision based on the CIA's reports, when it seems clear that this isn't the case, especially given the repeated reports, both then and now, that Cheney was badgering the CIA to get them to overstate the case for war.
We've talked before about the "credibility gap" of this administration, and now Time has made the issue its cover story. Truth exists, people.
