How Bush Hides His Mistakes on Iraq: "Most everybody in a position to know has agreed that a huge mistake has been made.
'We were almost all wrong,' David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, testified last week.
'In this case, there's no question that there was an intelligence failure, in some form or another,' Sen. Trent Lott (news, bio, voting record) (R-Miss.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said yesterday on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'Clearly this is not the immediate threat many assumed before the war,' is how Charles Duelfer, Kay's replacement, put it a few months ago when he noted 'the apparent absence of existing weapons stocks.'
Bush will announce this week that he is creating, by executive order, a bipartisan independent panel of at least nine members that will make a report in 2005, the White House confirmed yesterday. But those close to the president say he is doing so while continuing to avoid any explicit public acknowledgment that the intelligence was wrong. Why the reluctance to state what appears increasingly obvious as Kay spent the past 10 days dashing prospects that significant weapons stockpiles would be found in Iraq? Although the tactic may appear to be obtuse, there is a real strategy behind the Bush response -- and one that has been used before, to great effect.
Bush aides have learned through hard experience that admitting error only projects weakness and invites more abuse. Conversely, by postponing an acknowledgment -- possibly beyond Election Day -- the White House is generating a fog of uncertainty around Kay's stark findings, and potentially softening a harsh public judgment."
- posted by geoff @ #