Missing the "Bait And Switch"

William M. Arkin blogs (on the Washington Post) about Ray McGovern's hostile (yet very necessary) questioning of Donald Rumsfeld.

Arkin believes that the situation was born out of not knowing the difference between outright lies and gross incompetence; he contends that while Rumsfeld has made mistakes, he has been honest about what he knew about Iraq's Saddam Era-capabilities. As he puts it:

If the issue here is Saddam Hussein's connection to al Qaeda and his involvement in 9/11, to the "bulletproof" evidence the administration claimed, and more important for America, to the likelihood that Saddam would have ever shared any WMD with terrorists -- the true strategic assumption behind the Iraq war and the justification for our entire WMD obsessed foreign policy today -- McGovern scored.

But if the issue is Zarqawi, and a spooked and reeling Bush administration worrying that they just don't really know what's going on in places like Iraq, that they can't rely on the great CIA, and that they can't predict what will happen, Rumsfeld scored.

What Arkin has completely missed is the fact that Zarqawi was Rumsfeld's deflection of the original question: "Why did you lie to get us into a war?"

McGovern wanted an explanation about the lead-up. Maybe I'm off here, but was Zarqawi a big named mentioned before the invasion? I don't remember Bush mentioning the guy's name once before August 2003. Besides, McGovern doesn't even mention Zarqawi until after Rumsfeld did (and when he did, he says it as a question). Would someone with 27 years of intellegence experience challenege a public official live in public without doing their homework. I vote for "nay."

So if you combine the actual interaction with a little common sense, you reach this conclusion: Rumsfeld, not wanting to admit that he didn't remember his own words, deflected the question. "Those words" that McGovern repeated (almost verbatim) were in regards to invading Iraq, not fighting off insurgents after US and Coalition troops had been in Iraq for some time. McGovern was asking about Saddam's Iraq, not Zarqawi's. What's worse is that Rumsfeld's first option was to pass the buck, blaming Colin Powell, President Bush, the Intelligence Community and then the troops ("It’s easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style? They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons. We believed he had those weapons.")

So there are no options here. It's pretty clear where McGovern was headed, and what Rumsfeld was trying to do in response. A shame that Arkin (like Paula Zahn, apparently) is trying to defend what really can't be defended.

Personally, I think "the Bobs" from Office Space should give Rumsfeld an evaluation.