When Bush’s intentional deception comes back to haunt him

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 5:27 AM on April 30, 2008.

We don’t hear nearly as much about ongoing events in Afghanistan as we should, so it was encouraging to hear a question from ABC News’ Martha Raddatz about the other war at this morning’s White House press conference. Specifically, she asked, “Are we winning in Afghanistan?”

“I think we’re making progress in Afghanistan, but there’s a very resilient enemy that obviously wants to kill people that stand in the way of their re-imposition of a state that is — which vision is incredibly dark…. And it’s difficult in Afghanistan. If you know the history of the country, you understand it’s hard to go from the kind of society in which they had been living to one in which people are now responsible for their own behavior. But I am pleased with a lot of things. One, I’m pleased with the number of roads that have been built. I’m pleased with the number of schools that have opened up. I’m pleased a lot of girls, young girls are going to school. I’m pleased health clinics are now being distributed around the country. I’m pleased with the Afghan army, that when they’re in the fight they’re good.”

When Raddatz pressed him a little further, asking, “But do you think we’re winning?” Bush responded, “I do, I think we’re making good progress. I do, yes.”

To her credit, Raddatz had a point to all of this, beyond just inquiring about the status of the war.

She asked Bush recently the exact same questions regarding the war in Iraq, and the president conceded that he misstated the truth about progress, on purpose, in order to help troop “morale.”

From a recent ABC report:

RADDATZ: All during that period [in 2006] — April, May, June, July — 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?

The president was conceding that he was repeating falsehoods about progress on Iraq throughout 2006, because he wanted to “bolster the spirits of the people in the field.” The problem, of course, with lying and getting caught, though, is when you say the exact same thing later on, there’s no way to know whether it’s sincere or a rhetorical morale-boosting scheme.

And as long as we’re on the subject, I just thought I’d add that Bush’s explanation for why he was lying in 2006 is itself a lie. He wasn’t concerned about “bolstering spirits”; he was concerned about Republicans losing badly in the midterm elections. The president had to defend non-existent progress to counter Democratic arguments that his policy was failing.

Philip Carter added that hearing the president exaggerate progress in Iraq did little to help “morale” among the troops.

There you have it folks. The president of the United States admitting that his own certainty about the mission was more important than telling the truth to the American people.

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. We 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?

Bush used the same the rhetoric this morning about Afghanistan. Once that trust is gone, it’s impossible to get it back, isn’t it?

Tagged as: afghanistan, bush, media