I realize the headline is a bit over the top, but how else would you summarize this in a single sentence?
RADDATZ: All during that period -- April, May, June, July [of 2006] -- when things were really going downhill, people were talking about there being civil war.
BUSH: Yes.RADDATZ: .You were saying, 'We're winning. We have a plan for victory. We are winning,' up through October.
BUSH: Well, there was -- I also recognized -- I think if you'd go through the -- kind of fully analyze my statements, I was also saying, "The fighting is very tough, it's -- you know, the extremism is unacceptable. The murder is unacceptable." And you know, it's very important to be realistic.
RADDATZ: But the overall thing -- when you say, "We're winning," you know what the American people hear. You know how that will play.
BUSH: Well, yes. I think we -- and I wanted -- that's as much trying to bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well as -- look, you can't have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, "It's not worth it," or, "You're losing." I mean, what does that do for morale? I'm the commander in chief of the military as well, obviously, as, you know, somebody who speaks to the country. And if you look at my remarks, they were balanced. They weren't Pollyannaish.
That's his explanation for why over the years he has continued to maintain that, despite all evidence to the contrary, things are going well in Iraq. If he told the truth, you see, morale would suffer.
This assumes, of course, that both the American people, and far more importantly the men and women serving in Iraq, are morons. Rather than believe their own experience, Bush thought they would listen to him instead. Rather than produce cognitive dissonance, Bush apparently believed that all his happy talk would actually replace reality in the minds of our soldiers.
WaPo's Phillip Carter nails it:
I was in Iraq during this time in 2006. I remember well how the violence spiraled out of control after the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006. How every single indicator pointed in the direction of doom; how all our advisory efforts seemed to produce little to no security improvement; how we felt like spectators watching a civil war engulf Iraq, with too few troops to make a difference, and no political direction to do so.
All through this period, I remember the president, his senior aides and senior military commanders toeing the party line that things were going swimmingly. The dissonance between the rhetoric from Washington and our experience in Iraq was stark. WWe knew the ground truth. Being deceived by our senior political leaders certainly didn't change that, nor did it help morale at all. If anything, it hurt morale by undermining confidence in the chain of command. Put bluntly, if you can't trust your generals and political leaders to tell you and your families the truth, how can you trust them at all?It's disappointing to hear now, two years after the fact, that the president was knowingly bull----ing us the whole time. And that he justified such dishonesty in the name of supporting the troops and protecting their morale. That's an insult to America's men and women in uniform (and their families), who deserve to be told the truth by their political leaders about what's going on. It's also an insult to us, as voters, who deserve the truth so we can make the right decisions in the voting booth.
We need the truth from our leaders, not propaganda designed to lift our spirits by obscuring the truth about what is being done in our name.
Meanwhile, in other news, at least McCain admits he's digging for ponies every once in awhile. I don't think that excuses it, but still....
UPDATE: You can count on Yglesias for perspective:
Both Phil and Kevin seem a bit too delicate to note that the President, even in his admission of past lying, is pretty clearly coming up with a new lie here. He wasn't pretending things were going well in Iraq for the troops, he was doing it for the midterm elections.
UPDATE II: And then there's Spencer "Attackerman" Ackerman's take:
You know what's great for morale? Being lied to about the strategy troops are sacrificing for. May Bush and bin Laden die in exactly the same way: alone, afraid, and in captivity.
Hardcore will never die.
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