The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting these statements by Karl Rove:
Presidential political adviser Karl Rove, racing up and down California last week ahead of the Democratic convention, said Sen. John Kerry is going to hear a lot more about his vote to approve military action in Iraq -- because the Republicans are ready to throw it right back at him.
By the time the American people vote in November, expect the Bush campaign to try to box the Democratic presidential candidate in like this: Kerry had the same intelligence information as President Bush on Iraq, made statements to indicate he believed in the same threats, and voted to support Bush's position. So either he made a big mistake himself or the president made the correct decision.
"If Sen. Kerry now wants to come out and say, ' I looked at the intelligence ... I said (Hussein) was a danger. I said he had weapons of mass destruction. But the president is a liar for saying the same thing?' That's going to be a hard sell to the American people,'' Rove said in an interview during a stopover in Sacramento on Friday.
"In order to be intellectually honest, then (the Democratic presidential team) has got to say if Bush is wrong for believing these things, Kerry is equally wrong for believing them as well.''
The Democrats should hope that this really is their strategy, since the answer to such an argument is simple. All Kerry has to say is that he saw the intelligence that was
cooked up in the OSP and stovepiped straight up to Cheney and then to Bush. Everyone who's paying attention knows that the recent Senate report is a whitewash, on a par with the Butler report whitewash of Tony Blair's "flawed intelligence."
As David Kay is reported today as saying:“Anything that would confirm WMD in Iraq – very little scrutiny. Anything that showed Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, had a much higher gate to pass because if it were true, all of US policy towards Iraq would have fallen asunder.
“I think what you have in both the Senate Report and in the Butler Commission Report is a disturbing merger of the lines between intelligence, whose real role was to speak truth to power, and power whose real role is to influence the public to do the course of action that they’ve decided upon.
“That line blurred and blurred on both sides of the Atlantic with regard to Iraq.”
He said that Mr Blair and Mr Bush should both have realised that the intelligence they were being presented with did not support the claims that Iraq actually had weapons.
“I think the Prime Minister as I would say the US President should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exit for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction,” he said.
“That was not something that required a war and inspectors like myself going in if you’d fairly interpreted the evidence that existed.”
He said that the two leaders may not have been sufficiently critical of the intelligence because they had a “multitude” of other reasons for going to war.
“WMD was only one and I think in their mind, not really the most important one. And so the doubts about the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was not as serious to them as it seemed to be to the rest of the world,” he said.
What Kay avoids saying or questioning is the elephant in the living room and the reason both the Butler and Senate reports were carefully crafted to avoid assigning blame to either Bush or Blair - that the Bush administration neocons and Cheney's special intelligence factory did in fact use the intelligence they received, as well as the intelligence they made up, in a way that wildly exaggerated -
created might be a better word - the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.
Kerry saw the evidence that was presented to everyone else by the Bush Administration. He wasn't the only person fooled by the phony bushista case for invading Iraq. Even now, the warhawks like to argue that "everyone thought" that Iraq had WMD. And they did believe it, too - because the faked up, exaggerated and massaged intelligence was persuasively presented to make the case by the Bushies. How was Kerry supposed to have known how many lies were in that intelligence? How could he have known about Curveball and the heavy involvement of the INC? Like many, many others he assumed the information had been properly vetted and analysed, not that it was the pack of lies it turned out to be.
What can Rove have Bush say to that argument? That Kerry should have known the intelligence sucked? But if that were true, then Bush should have known even more. I mean, he was sitting in the Oval Office while his minions made the case for an invasion he and his neocons and hawks wanted long before 9/11.
