Pul, pull, pull to the left...

Peter Daou

Political consultant, former adviser to Hillary Clinton

Pull, Pull, Pull to the Left: On Rove's Revisionism and Obama's "Failing" Presidency






Frustration is a wonderful motivator for blogging -- and for those of us steeped in politics, each day brings an extra measure of it.
Take Karl Rove's encomium to the gloriously successful Iraq war and his abiding humility in admitting a big mistake: not attacking the war's critics more effectively.
Trotting out a long-ago debunked argument about weapons of mass destruction, Rove writes:

Saying the commander-in-chief intentionally lied America into war is about the most serious accusation that can be leveled at a president. The charge was false--and it opened the way for politicians in both parties to move the debate from differences over issues into ad hominem attacks.

Yes, it is a serious charge, and to those of us who protested the Iraq invasion with all our might (and who were called traitors in the process) it was not leveled lightly. It would take more than a single post to fully refute the falsehoods in Rove's piece, but here are a few key points:

• Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator, one of several across the globe. Seeing him brought to justice was an exceptional thing. We don't focus enough attention on human rights violations across the globe - specifically the wholesale oppression of girls and women - and I wish Saddam's fate on every other human being who brutalizes and slaughters innocent people.
• However, the Bush administration did not put forth human rights as the primary rationale or justification for war. Instead, they lied, claiming at the time of the invasion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent, grave, growing threat to the United States. Countless articles, editorials, blog posts and reports have enumerated those falsehoods and exaggerations and I direct Mr. Rove to "the Google" to peruse them.
• No amount of revisionist history will undo the immense and unfathomable death, pain, suffering, blood, gore, and torture unleashed by our 'preemptive' invasion, the shattered families, the psychological damage, among our veterans and the Iraqi people. The moral damage to America is deep. The resources spent in Iraq could have been allocated to millions of teachers, cops, firefighters, nurses, to education and medical research, to health care -- saving thousands if not millions of lives rather than killing hundreds of thousands.
• Nearly 400 Iraqis died in violence last month. The U.S. still maintains a massive troop presence there. As with Lebanon, where I grew up, stability in Iraq is tenuous at best. By all measures in the preceding paragraphs, the Iraq fiasco was, is and always will be a failure. Perhaps less of an unmitigated failure than it could have been, but a failure nonetheless.

Read more:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/pull-pull-pull-to-the-lef_b_647756.html