Eleanor Clift Quotes
Bush does not want to go down in history as the president who lost in Iraq. His strategy to the extent he has one is to hang tough and let whoever succeeds him take the fall.
Clift, Eleanor. "Capitol Letter." Newsweek, 15 Dec. 2006.
Podharetz was citing the Vietnam war. The two American occasions where the plausibility seemed to fade were the Vietnam War and The Irag war. Both Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush as Bismarck predicted, had much political trouble over the wars.
Ikle wrote this over a decade before both the military and civilian leaders fell into this trap in the 1994 Iraq War.
Bush assumes that this meant that all the people agreed with his decision to invade Iraq. While that might have been the case, there are other possibilities that many historians, journalists and other analysts have suggested. The Vice President, and his personal staff, were known to have visited them all and lobbied for the invasion. They pressured several of them who may have not wanted to run afoul of what seemed to be the most powerful vice president in American History. Or they may have thought that the decision had already been made, and it was time to join together and loyally support the policy decision that had been made. There were few strong independent thinkers in the top tier as Bush was not intellectually or emotionally inclined to have open staff arguments to work out a policy or very strong advisors with different points of view. The strongest of the advisors like Secretary of State Colin Powell had been lied to and persuaded there was “clear evidence” that Iraq was about to deploy a nuclear weapon. This made Powell an advocate. The intelligence given to Powell and the others was wrong and much was fabricated or obtained from an unreliable source who had been pushed as trustworthy by the Vice President. The CIA Director, had told those all that the evidence and case for the fact that Iraq was developing and close to deploying a nuclear weapon was a “slam dunk”.
Eleanor Clift is an American political reporter, television pundit, and author. She is a contributor to MSNBC and blogger for The Daily Beast. She is best known as a regular panelist on the The McLaughlin Group. Clift is a board member at the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation).
