Below The Beltway

As a piece of literature, history, and autobiography, Scott McClellan’s media attention grabbing book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception isn’t great or even good. As someone who loves reading books, I found myself skipping over entire chapters with ease to get to the part that mattered simply because McClellan’s personal story quite frankly isn’t all that interesting, and nobody really cares about what was going on in the Bush Administration before the really important decisions started being made on the morning of 11 September 2001.

And I’m not at all sure what to think about Scott McClellan the man after reading this short little book. He says that he signed on with George W. Bush’s Presidential campaign, and became part of the White House staff because he really thought that Bush would change politics in Washington. His only evidence for that seems to be his observations of how Bush behaved as Governor of Texas; but, as McClellan himself admits, the Governor of Texas is relatively weak and forced to work with the legislature and other statewide office holders to achieve his goals. The fact that McClellan thought Bush would act the same was as President of the United States as he did as Governor of Texas strikes me as incredibly naive to say the least.

Anyway, sign on to the White House Staff he did, and he became a witness to a history that will continue to be debated, evaluated, and unearthed for decades to come I suspect.

The essential charge that McClellan makes is that the Bush Administration, most especially the parts of it typified by men like Vice-President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, had motives for advocating war with Iraq separate and apart from the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. Specifically it was the idea, born even before al Qaeda flew airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington, that the United States should devote itself, and it’s military and financial resources to remaking the political makeup of the Arab world.

This isn’t an entirely new allegation. The Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks reported much the same in his history of the Iraq War. The difference with McClellan’s book is that the same information the Ricks reports as coming from Pentagon sources now comes, first hand, from a White House insider.

McClellan also makes the point that President Bush, and other war advocates, reached a point in their minds sometime in 2002 where it pretty much didn’t matter what the evidence regarding Iraq’s WMD program might have been. They had decided to go to war, and choose to emphasize only the evidence that supported their conclusion.

More importantly, as McClellan notes and Ricks substantiated, they went to war with an entirely unrealistic idea of how the war should be fought, how the Iraqi people would react to foreign occupiers in their land, and what type of force should be left in the country after Saddam was overthrown. The result was to create the opportunity for the emergence of an insurgency that has killed more American soldiers, and Iraqi civilians, than the war itself did. However history judges the wisdom of the decision to go to war itself, there’s no question that the planning of that war was a complete and utter disaster.

The Valerie Plame affair plays a prominent role in McClellan’s biography, mostly because he feels, rightly I think, that he was sent out in front of the media by those above him to make statements that weren’t entirely true. Whether or not a crime was committed in leaking Valerie Plame’s name to the press isn’t what’s really relevant; what’s relevant is the fact that the Administration deliberately engaged in a campaign to discredit a report by her husband that contradicted the Administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

As it turns out, Joe Wilson was right about that, and the Administration was wrong. There was no chance of an Iraqi-created mushroom cloud being unleashed on an American, or Israeli, city in 2002-03 because there was no real nuclear weapons program in Iraq. Just like there was no chemical weapons program and no biological weapons program.

What McClellan’s book reveals most starkly, though, isn’t the lies, mis-statements, mis-steps, and outright incompetence that predated the Iraq War. It’s the decision making process inside the Bush Administration. Once the President made a decision, it was made even if the evidence revealed later suggested that it should be re-evaluated.

Some people call that courage. I call it dumb-assed stubbornness.