Help Bush Identify His Biggest non-9/11 Mistake
Hm. This is arguably another press conference item, which means I lied. Dammit!
Anyway, be sure to check out the following from the Center for American Progress: Vote in our poll: President Bush needs your help.
It’s an online poll that lets you pick from five possible answers Bush could have given to the “other than 9/11, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve made?” press conference question that he honestly couldn’t think of an answer for. The choices:
- Invading Iraq without a plan for the aftermath.
- Telling the American people that Iraq definitely possessed WMD.
- Failing to send U.S. troops into Tora Bora to capture Osama bin Laden in November 2001.
- Disparaging Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki when he said more troops would be needed in Iraq.
- Focusing on missile defense while ignoring repeated warnings of an imminent al Qaeda attack before 9/11.
The last one is arguably not a valid response to the question he was actually asked, but even with it excluded, that’s a pretty good list of candidates. Reading them actually gave me a new appreciation of the difficulty Bush faced during the press conference: I had a really hard time picking one, too.
April 15th, 2004 at 5:35 am
I pick #2, hands down. Because it’s the only one that flirts with the whole problem of selling a war by any means necessary. Which is what he did.
April 15th, 2004 at 11:43 am
I too would pick number 2, with number 4 not far behind.
Number 3 is a non-starter, though: had Bush called for an invasion of Afghanistan before 9-11, no one would have supported it. Look at how many people protested the invasion of Afghanistan AFTER 9-11. I can’t believe John Kerry, most Democrats, or this site would have accepted a pre-emptive invasion of Afghanistan by a Republican adminstration any better than they have the invasion of Iraq. This is not to say a 2001 invasion of Afghanistan wouldn’t have been a better idea than the invasion of Iraq – but it is dishonest to suggest that many of us who are mad about Iraq now would almost certainly have been just as mad about Afghanistan in 2001.
April 15th, 2004 at 11:48 am
Make that last line: “…but it is dishonest to suggest that many of us who are mad about Iraq now would NOT almost certainly have been just as mad about Afghanistan in 2001.”
(and if that were my biggest mistake since 9-11, I’d be doing a whole lot better…)