When Presidents Attack
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Well, it seems my day of non-blogging (to celebrate Mrs. F's birthday--during which we saw the delightful Wallace and Gromit movie) was chock full of material, largely focused on the return of the "you're either with us or against us" theme in President Bush's Veterans Day speech. If you're catching up on this, here's the gist from Salon's War Room:

In a speech in Pennsylvania today, the president accused his critics of making "baseless attacks," rewriting history and throwing out "false charges" that serve only to undercut the troops now serving in Iraq. Although a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week showed that 57 percent of the American public now believes that the president deliberately misled the country about the case for war in Iraq, Bush marginalized those concerns as the wild charges of "some Democrats and anti-war critics."

Here's the first money quote from the NYTimes:

"Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," he said. "These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

And here's the second money quote via Facade Friend El Jeffe:

I find Bush's arrogrance especially galling, saying:

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Tobyhanna, Pa.

Who's rewriting history? This is coming from the guy who said the threat was weapons of mass distruction, and when that didn't pan out (after the war was started, mind you, not because weapons inspectors were allowed to find out beforehand), switched the rationale to spreading democracy, or removing a brutal dictator from power, etc.

But I digress. Essentially, this was red meat thrown at the lions on the Right to get the base (which is starting to seriously wither) back in line. Instapundit took the bait and had pretty much the most forceful and most discussed quote of the day:

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.

He later started to back-pedal:

Reader Kathleen Boerger emails: "Could you do me a favor and define 'patriotism' please?"

I think it starts with not uttering falsehoods that damage the country in time of war, simply because your donor base wants to hear them.

Patriotic people could -- and did -- oppose the war. But so did a lot of scoundrels. And some who supported the war were not patriotic, if they did it out of opportunism or political calculation rather than honest belief. Those who are now trying to recast their prior positions through dishonest rewriting of history are not patriotic now, nor were they when they supported the war, if they did so then out of opportunism --which today's revisionist history suggests.

Basically, he's pointing fingers at Kerry and Biden. That's fine, but he's still ducking the larger issue--did the BushCo administration fix facts and intelligence around policy (as the Downing Street Memos point to), because it's not completely obvious that they didn't. And frankly, there's also the larger question of whether an American citizen can question the motives of his or her government without being branded an unpatriotic heritic. But we'll leave that for another post someday down the line. (For a more thorough debunking of the Instapundit post, check this post at The Talent Show.) But this meme is certainly being taken up by GOP operatives, like Talking Points Action Figure Ken Mehlman (via the WaPo original article reporting on the speech):

And Mehlman, addressing a GOP dinner in Fort Wayne, Ind., mocked Democratic calls for further investigation into the handling of intelligence before the war. "Maybe this investigation will reveal that they were brainwashed," he said, according to prepared remarks released by the RNC. "Or that, like John Kerry, they were for the war before they were against it for short-term political gain."

But back to the heart of the matter (for this unpatriotic HAF--Hate America Firster). This morning, Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus at the WaPo have a very good round-up critique of past White House arguements for going to war:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

There's a lot more, but here, in my view, is the big reminder:

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce "all relevant Security Council resolutions," and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

But back to the meme that everyone had the same intelligence, here's some more from the War Room post noted above:

But of course, members of the House and Senate weren't privy to all of the same intelligence the White House was. As Kevin Drum wrote the other day, it's true that lots of people thought before the war that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. "The problem is . . . that there were also a fair number of people who had been skeptical about Iraqi WMD. INR, for example, thought the African uranium was bogus. DIA thought our prime witness for Iraqi-al-Qaida WMD collaboration was lying. The Air Force found the evidence on drones to be laughable. DOE didn't believe in the aluminum tubes. None of these dissents was acknowledged by the Bush administration."

How would the prewar debate have gone if everyone knew what the administration knew before the war started: that stories from an al-Qaida member about an Iraq connection had been called into question; that warnings Colin Powell delivered about mobile weapons labs weren't based on solid evidence; that claims about an Iraq-Niger had been debunked within the CIA before Bush made them; that pronouncements Condoleezza Rice made about aluminum tubes had been discredited before she spoke?

And then there's the Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi question, where it's come out that this informant, whose information seemed to be the main basis for BushCo claims to a tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, was deemed a likely fabricator. As the Daily Dissent blog notes:

The simple fact of the matter is that the Democrats are just now gaining access to the intelligence that was contrary to the White House's agenda, such as the following:

This is the first report from Ibn al-Shaykh in which he claims Iraq assisted al-Qaida’s CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear] efforts. However, he lacks specific details on the Iraqis involved, the CBRN materials associated with the assistance, and the location where training occurred. It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.

Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.

Oddly enough, this didn't seem to make it into Bush's little temper tantrum today.

One other thing about this speech. Much of it wasn't all that new. Check out this post at Sadly No for a close comparison between the text of yesterday's speech to the one Bush gave on October 6.