Former adviser to President George W. Bush, Karl Rove, says in his new book — Courage and Consequence — that he’s at fault for failing to counter Democratic attacks over the administration’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But, he maintains, the administration did not use the WMD threat to lie the nation into an unnecessary war against a country that posed no threat to the United States.
It’s somewhat just that Rove takes responsibility, but not in the way that he should. Several authors have outlined how the Bush administration knew, or should have known, that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had no weapons, and that invasion on that basis was, in fact, a lie.
Although Rove tries to minimize the conflict, morphing it into a simple dispute over political tactics, that obscures the larger moral question, which is Rove’s culpability in selling a war that his superiors (at least) or even he (at most) had good reason to believe was unjustified. (Remember, it was Rove who sat at the head of a White House task force charged with selling the war.) From that perspective, Rove isn’t just responsible for a bungled political effort. He’s responsible for the needless deaths of thousands.
Are we ever going to answer that larger moral question, I wonder?
Tags: George W. Bush, Iraq War, Karl Rove
Loading ...
I believe that Darth Cheney’s book, when it gets published, will ape Karl Rove’s. Along with Bush’s. They’ll all have their different version about how they were blameless in the whole matter. And I think they are all speaking total falsehoods.
I haven’t read Vincent Bugliosi’s book yet, but when I find it, I will.
In the meantime, I just read another book about this whole WMD and Iraq War debacle: “The Italian Letter: How The Bush Administration Used A Fake Letter To Build The Case For War In Iraq” by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce (published in 2007).
An interesting book that basically details how the CIA and other intelligence efforts were trying their best to inform the White House about there wasn’t any WMD in Iraq, but Bush/Cheney didn’t like what they were saying, so they created the WHIG (White House Iraq Group) to look for their own intelligence to back up their reasoning to go to war in Iraq. And this Italian letter detailing yellowcake uranium from Niger was used, even after it was revealed to come from an unrealiable intelligence source, and that the whole thing was fabricated and utterly false. But the WHIG used it anyways, which the President uttered a phrase about it to be the truth when it wasn’t.
Very interesting read. I highly encourage reading it. Just for your info, Steve.