Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has a column in today's Lawrence Journal-World in which she accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney of having amnesia. However, it appears that it is Rubin herself who has suffered memory loss.
Rubin claims that Cheney used "deliberately distorted intelligence ... to justify the invasion." Apparently, Rubin has forgotten that the Clinton administration as late of January 2001 claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and, therefore, was a "clear and present danger at all times." She also appears to have forgotten that, after the invasion of Iraq, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said, "The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent," and "The consensus was the same, from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. It was the same intelligence belief that our allies and friends around the world shared."
Rubin also writes that Cheney "swallowed the claims of Ahmed Chalabi, his favorite Iraqi expat." Rubin seems to have forgotten that, like the intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD, Bush and Cheney inherited Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) from Clinton and Gore. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with the INC on September 14, 2000 and noted the Clinton administration’s support for Chalabi and the Iraqi opposition. “The United States salutes the courage of Iraqis everywhere in the Opposition,” Albright said. “I wish them success in presenting to the world the true hopes and needs of the Iraqi people, and ultimately in bringing democracy and the rule of law to their country."
Albright’s meeting with the INC was not the first time a Clinton administration official met with the opposition group in 2000. According to the BBC, a Clinton administration official met with a nine-man INC delegation led by Chalabi in June 2000 and “reiterated the administration’s view that the Iraqi leader should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
The article also noted, “The Clinton administration is trying to beef up the INC after nearly 10 years of sanctions on Iraq have brought the world no closer to bringing down the Iraqi leader.” Part of beefing up the INC included a pledge from the Clinton administration to provide the INC with $8 million.
Who was the member of the Clinton administration who met with Chalabi and the INC? Why, it was none other than Vice President Al Gore, the same man who in 2004 criticized the Bush administration for putting its trust in Chalabi, a man who “had been convicted of fraud and embezzling 70 million dollars in public funds from a Jordanian bank” eight years before Gore met with him. Gore also must have been suffering from amnesia.
Rubin claims that American troops who "died because the Pentagon failed to provide body armor or up-armored humvees in Cheney’s time." She has forgotten that after American troops entered Baghdad after just a few days, Democrats claimed that Bill Clinton deserved credit for the speedy victory. Reportedly, Al Franken, who is now a U.S. senator, approached Paul Wolfowitz and said, “Clinton's military did pretty well in Iraq, huh?" Fred Kaplan of Slate.com made a similar argument. “Weapons systems and war strategies often take years, even decades, to evolve,” Kaplan wrote. Further, “[T]he wonder weapons of Gulf War II—the weapons that allowed for ‘a combination of precision, speed, and boldness the enemy did not expect and the world had not seen before,’ as the second President Bush put it in his victory speech last night onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—were developed and built during the presidency of Bill Clinton.” Of course, after our troops started being killed by improvised explosive devices, no Democrat would acknowledge that the Clinton administration failed to develop and build defense systems to protect our troops from those weapons.
Unfortunately, Bush (and Cheney) Derangement Syndrome appears to affect one's memory.
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