Tuesday, July 15, 2003
WMD Were Never the Real Reason For War
From Karl Rove: Bush's Brain by James Moore and Wayne Slater An abridgment of a portion of Chapter 16 - The Baghdad Road
The year 2002 was the first big political test for the administration of George W. Bush. The Domestic political dynamics were hard on Karl Rove and his president. The economy refused to get up off its knees and widespread corporate corruption continued to punish Wall Street instead of the CEOs who had committed the fraud.
The war on terrorism was compounding the politics. Nobody knew if Osama Bin Laden was dead or still clattering around Afghanistan. Increased chatter indicated that more terrorist attacks could be imminent.
On top of these problems, the Democrats were calling for a new agency to manage homeland security. George Bush didn't want to create a gigantic new bureaucracy on his watch.
Control of the politics was slipping from Karl Rove's grasp. Democrats were so optimistic that House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt predicted the Democrats might pick up as many as 30 to 40 new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Karl Rove went to work and came up with a strategy that provided a turnkey solution to every crisis President Bush was confronting - and the Democratic advantage went away overnight.
Jason Stanfor, a national Democratic consultant who operates out of Texas admitted that the Democrats were politically disarmed by Rove's ingenuity:
"It was just brilliant. They figured out real soon that Osama was going to be a hard guy to go and get. He can hide in a cave, right? So what do they do? They just picked a war they could win. Hey, we can't take over a country that doesn't exist, so fine we'll go take over some country. We can't invade al Qaeda. We can't occupy it. We can't even find it. Okay. Fine. But we do know where Baghdad is. We've got a map. We can find it on a map. And they've got oil and an evil guy. So let's go there. They never stop and say that. But they know it's what they are doing. It has to be the most evil political calculation in American History." ...
