Jim Was Right!

I remember our very own blog head honcho, Jim Sondergeld, saying that the Bush Administration should have fought back more vigorously when the Democrats were lying right and left about the Iraq war. Well, Karl Rove apparently realizes that now, too:

At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his administration’s heart. What Democrats started seven years ago left us less united as a nation to confront foreign challenges and overcome America’s enemies.

Letting the Democrats set the terms of that argument is still hurting conservatives in general and the war effort in particular. So many people believed the despicable lies told by the Democrats during Bush's administration, not caring whether they were putting our soldiers in harm's way or weakening our defense. All they wanted, and it worked, by the way, was their power back. Now look at the mess we've got.

Read Rove's article linked above, and you'll be nodding your head and saying, "I knew that!!" This is a big "I told you so!" for Jim, though I doubt he's taking a lot of comfort in that.

JASmius adds: I can't much argue with Andy McCarthy on the following:

Yes, the failure of the Bush Administration to defend the President’s integrity on the WMD question contributed mightily to the problem, but it did not cause the problem. What caused the problem was the Administration’s failure to make a convincing, defensible case that military operations in Iraq were a logical and worthy extension of the war against jihadist terror.

If, instead of putting almost all its eggs in the WMD basket, the administration had tended to that case, then (a) the failure to find WMD in the anticipated quantities would not have been the public-relations catastrophe it turned out to be; (b) the claim that the administration had not been forthright in marshaling the intelligence to justify the invasion would have had much less force; and (c) there would have been strong political support for removing the regime in Iran at a point in time far more propitious than now, when the regime stands on the brink of obtaining nuclear power. Iran, as I’ve detailed, was clearly abetting al-Qaeda, was probably complicit in the 9/11 attacks (as the 9/11 Commission intriguingly intimated but failed to investigate), has a storied history of murdering Americans, has never stopped fueling anti-American terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was unquestionably ramping up its WMD programs.

The American people went to war after the 9/11 attacks because they accepted the urgency of defeating our terrorist enemies and the countries that facilitated them. Support for the war flagged when the government’s objectives parted ways from the public’s. When the Bush Administration decided to highlight Iraq’s WMD, it sold too short the terror ties that were the only coherent connection to the casus belli on which the nation agreed. 

Operation Iraqi Freedom was part of the War on Terror.  Woulda been a lot easier to sell that if the Bushies had, um, sold it that way.  Ironic that it so completely disarmed US on disarming Iran.  The inevitable war with the mullahgarchy is going to be the biggest blot on what could have been a sterling Bush legacy.