This entry was posted on
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at
10:37 am and is filed
under It’s War! It’s Legal! It’s Lovely!.

Scott McClellan on Bush and the selling of the Iraq war:

In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw “his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness,” something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.

The president’s real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because “Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East,” McClellan wrote.

“Rather than open this Pandora’s Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth,” he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used “innuendo and implication” and “intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.”

Andrew Sullivan on the above:

If this is true, if the president intentionally ignored data refuting the existence of Saddam’s WMDs, he should be impeached.

Also…

Scott McClellan on the “liberal media”:

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

Karl Rove on Scott McClellan:

“It shows how out of the loop he was,” Mr Rove, the man once known as “Bush’s Brain”, said on Fox News where he is now a commentator. “This doesn’t sound like Scott, it sounds like a left-wing blogger. I don’t remember him speaking up [about the concerns laid out in the book] at the time.”

Ooooooh, get her.

Videos and extras over at Crooks and Liars.

[Psst! The more I look at the likes of Iain Dale and Paul Staines (aka ‘Guido Fawkes’, aka ‘Mr Anti-The-Current-Establishment’), the more I’m reminded of the role played by people like Karl Rove and Scott McClellan in the selling of a stupid president and his stupid war. Dale especially. His pockets are lined with Ashcroft cash, so even if he isn’t officially a professional liar for the Tory party, he may as well put it on his CV.]