Say Anything Blog

Last week there was a press release issued from Vanity Fair regarding statements made by so-called neo-conservatives during the course of interviews conducted for an article that will be running after the election.  The quotes Vanity Fair published in that press release appeared to be pretty damaging to the Bush administration’s policies on Iraq and were widely cited in the media as evidence of growing dissatisfaction with the President’s war policies even among conservatives.

But was Vanity Fair’s press release a fair representation of what these neo-conservatives told the magazine?  Not according to the neo-conservatives themselves.

For instance, Vanity Fair quotes former Bush administration adviser Richard Perle thusly:

“The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity,” Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic “failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. “And then,” says Perle, “you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, “The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn’t get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. ... At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don’t think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.”

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: “I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ’Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ’No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.’ ... I don’t say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.”

Yet Perle responds to that with this:

Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday’s election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election.

I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country.

I believe it would be a catastrophic mistake to leave Iraq, as some are demanding, before the Iraqis are able to defend their elected government. As I told Mr. Rose, the terrorist threat to our country, which is real, would be made much worse if we were to make an ignominious withdrawal from Iraq.

I told Mr. Rose that as a nation we had waited too long before dealing with Osama bin Laden. We could have destroyed his operation in Afghanistan before 9/11.

I believed we should not repeat that mistake with Saddam Hussein, that we could not responsibly ignore the threat that he might make weapons of mass destruction available to terrorists who would use them to kill Americans. I favored removing his regime. And despite the current difficulties, I believed, and told Mr. Rose, that “if we had left Saddam in place, and he had shared nerve gas with al Qaeda, or some other terrorist organization, how would we compare what we’re experiencing now with that?”

I believe the president is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path.

Not exactly the same message we get from Vanity Fair’s characterization of Perle’s opinions now, is it?

David Frum, unfortunately, got the same treatment.  Here’s what Vanity Fair has him saying:

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an “axis of evil,” it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because “the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them.” This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on “failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.

This is how Frum responds to that:

There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair, highlighted on the Drudge Report . Headlined “Now They Tell Us,” it purports to offer an “exclusive” access to “remorseful” former supporters of the Iraq war who will now “play the blame game” with “shocking frankness.”

[...]

My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous. . . .

In short, Vanity Fair transformed a Washington debate over “how to correct course and win the war” to advance obsessions all their own.

I could go on, but you get the point.  Vanity Fair is basically guilty of fraud.  They took what was intended to be constructive criticism of the war in Iraq that was, overall, supportive of the mission there and used it to paint a dim scene of the war that is more fitting with their liberal agenda.

We on the right spend a lot of time talking about how the anti-war stance many Democrats on the left have taken (Iraq is a failure, we can never win, etc.) hurts the war effort.  This is an example of how that works.

No honest supporter of the war in Iraq is going to claim that the war has gone perfectly.  It hasn’t.  Mistakes have been made.  Balls have been dropped.  But be that as it may, it doesn’t make the original mission any less worthy, nor does it make the original decision to pursue that mission in Iraq with invasion any less correct.  What we should be doing in this country is having an open and honest debate about the best way forward in Iraq.  This is what Mr. Perle, Mr. Frum and others were trying to do in their interviews with Vanity Fair, but as is so often the case the left has zeroed in on only the parts of that criticism they want to hear (the negative bits) and completely tuned out all that was constructive of positive.

It’s sad, yet that is exactly how the Iraq war debate has boiled down in this country.  Republicans want to talk about options for completing the mission in Iraq.  Democrats only want to talk about failure and how quickly we can give up.

I recently challenged readers of this website to give me one single example of a policy suggestion made by a Democrat since the invasion of Iraq that is aimed toward completing the mission in that country.  It’s telling that even after nearly 50 comments not one liberal reader has been able to cite a single example.

Telling, and more than a little sad.