Boxer, Rice Exchange Pointed Words

I just have to shout out a hearty “You go, girl!” to Senator Barbara Boxer of California. First she was the only Democratic Senator with the balls to sign on to the House’s protest of the Ohio vote, thereby forcing the issue to a full debate. That produced nothing but Repugnicans crying that we were trying to change the election, because Repugnicans can’t understand the difference between election results and election process. But I think it was a worthwhile endeavor, because it planted a seed in the minds of God’s Own Party that the Dems are beginning to sprout little pre-pubescent testicles. It also produced that wonderful quote (I can’t remember from whom,) “If an ATM can give me a receipt, why can’t a voting machine?”

Now she’s the only Senator holding Kindasleezzy Rice’s reptilian feet to the fire on her Secretary of State confirmation hearings. Here’s a taste:

BOXER: And I think the way we should start is by trying to set the record straight on some of the things you said going into this war. Now, since 9/11 we’ve been engaged in a just fight against terror. And I, like Senator Feingold and everyone here who was in the Senate at the time, voted to go after Osama bin Laden and to go after the Taliban, and to defeat al Qaeda. And you say they have left territory — that’s not true. Your own documents show that al Qaeda has expanded from 45 countries in ’01 to more than 60 countries today.

To which Kindasleezzy replied:

RICE: Now, as to the statement about territory and the terrorist groups, I was referring to the fact that the al Qaeda organization of Osama bin Laden, which once trained openly in Afghanistan, which once ran with impunity in places like Pakistan, can no longer count on hospitable territory from which to carry out their activities.

So let’s see if I got this straight. Al Qaeda in 2001 could train openly in 2 countries and was covertly operating in 45 countries. Now in 2005, they can’t train openly, but did expand their covert operations to 60 countries, including now secretly training in Iraq, where they never were before. Hmm, great success, Dr. Rice. You’re an exterminator who stepped on two cockroaches that were in plain sight, but did it so clumsily that in the process you knocked holes in the walls where more cockroaches are allowed to breed out of sight. And if I remember my history correctly, it seems al Qaeda was able to train covertly in the United States to some great measure of success, while you were ignoring a Presidential Daily Briefing entitled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the United States. Seems to me losing their open training bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan wouldn’t hurt them much at all.

BOXER: Well, with you in the lead role, Dr. Rice, we went into Iraq. I want to read you a paragraph that best expresses my views, and ask my staff if they would hold this up — and I believe the views of millions of Californians and Americans. It was written by one of the world’s experts on terrorism, Peter Bergen, five months ago. He wrote: “What we have done in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: We invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the heart of the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure bin Laden has long predicted was the U.S.’s long-term goal in the region. We deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden has long despised, ignited Sunni and Shi’a fundamentalist fervor in Iraq, and have now provoked a defensive jihad that has galvanized jihad-minded Muslims around the world. It’s hard to imagine a set of policies better designed to sabotage the war on terror.” This conclusion was reiterated last Thursday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank, which released a report saying that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of professionalized terrorists.

That’s your own administration’s CIA. NIC chairman Robert Hutchings said Iraq is, quote, “a magnet for international terrorist activity.”

And this was not the case in ’01. And I have great proof of it, including a State Department document that lists every country — could you hold that up? — in which al Qaeda operated prior to 9/11. And you can see the countries; no mention of Iraq. And this booklet was signed off on by the president of the United States, George W. Bush. It was put out by George Bush’s State Department, and he signed it. There was no al Qaeda activity there — no cells

Snap! That’s always been one of my biggest beefs with this misAdministration’s mentality. If you’re going to fight a War on Terror, you don’t engage in actions that create more terrorists. That would be like fighting a War on Drugs by locking up addicts so that they have a criminal record that makes it harder for them to go straight and brings them more despair, leading to more drug use… oh, wait, never mind, I think I get it. How can you have an ongoing War on Drugs without creating more druggies? How can you have an ongoing War on Terror without creating more terrorists? They don’t really want to win these wars, do they? That would be like the makers of Rogaine coming up with a permanent one-time cure for baldness. Not good for business (Halliburton, CACI, Titan, I’m looking your way…)

BOXER: Now, the war was sold to the American people, as Chief of Staff to President Bush Andy Card said, like a “new product.” Those were his words. Remember, he said, “You don’t roll out a new product in the summer.” Now, you rolled out the idea and then you had to convince the people, as you made your case with the president.

And I personally believe — this is my personal view — that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth. And I don’t say it lightly, and I’m going to go into the documents that show your statements and the facts at the time.

In other words, you’ve got as much credibility as used car salesman one car short of his monthly quota on the 30th of the month. How would our former Chevron executive respond to that?

RICE: Senator, I have to say that I have never, ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything. It is not my nature. It is not my character. And I would hope that we can have this conversation and discuss what happened before and what went on before and what I said without impugning my credibility or my integrity.

Kindasleezzy actually felt the need to defend herself against the impugning of her credibility a couple of more times later on:

RICE: Senator, we can have this discussion in any way that you would like. But I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity. Thank you very much.

RICE: Senator, I’m happy to continue the discussion, but I really hope that you will not imply that I take the truth lightly.

In order for your integrity to be questioned, wouldn’t you have to have some level of integrity in the first place? During the transition to the Bush misAdministration, Richard Clarke and Sandy Berger, among others, warned Kindasleezzy that the threat of terrorism from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda would be the number one security priority for the nation. You were the National Security Adviser, and given this warning, you still ignored the August 6th PDB. Dr. Rice, you lost all integrity on August 6th, 2001, and all credibility on September 11, 2001.

And as far as impugning goes, it’s not Senator Boxer who’s impugning you, it’s your own damn words.

BOXER: I’m just quoting what you said. You contradicted the president and you contradicted yourself.

BOXER: [P]perhaps the most well-known statement you’ve made was the one about Saddam Hussein launching a nuclear weapon on America with the image of, quote, quoting you, “a mushroom cloud.” That image had to frighten every American into believing that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of annihilating them if he was not stopped.

…On July 30th, 2003, …[i]n what appears to be an effort to downplay the nuclear-weapons scare tactics you used before the war, your answer was, and I quote, “It was a case that said he was trying to reconstitute. He’s trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody ever said that it was going to be the next year.”

…[N]ine months before you said this to the American people, what George Bush had said, President Bush, at his speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center? “If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly-enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.”

On October 10th, ’04, …you were asked about CIA Director Tenet’s remark that prior to the war he had, quote, “made it clear to the White House that he thought the nuclear-weapons program was much weaker than the program to develop other WMDs. Your response was this: “The intelligence assessment was that he was reconstituting his nuclear program; that, left unchecked, he would have a nuclear weapon by the end of the year.”

So to defend herself, Kindasleezzy goes back to the historical revisionism that we didn’t go to war only because of the WMD’s that Saddam didn’t have and couldn’t build, or the soon-to-be-reconstituted nuclear weapons program that never was, or the forged document from Niger that said Saddam was trying to have his yellowcake and eat it too, or the aluminum tubes that could never have been used to refine nuclear materials, or the mobile weapons labs that were for hydrogen weather balloons, but also because Saddam was a bad guy who didn’t play well with others:

RICE: …[W]e had gone to war with him twice in the past, in 1991 and in 1998. … he had an undetected biological weapons program that we didn’t learn of until 1995, that he was closer to a nuclear weapon in 1991 than anybody thought. And we knew, most importantly, that he had used weapons of mass destruction [back in 1988 when he gassed the Kurds].

Sounds like a pretty scary guy… back in the 1990’s. He used WMD’s and we fought him in 1991. I wonder why the president at that time didn’t do something about it then if Saddam was so scary? Well, the president at that time, George H. W. Bush explains it pretty well in his memoirs:

GEORGE H W BUSH: Trying to eliminate Saddam … would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq …there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

Back when I was a teenager and thought that I knew everything, I remember my father once told me that someday, as I got older, I would realize just how smart and wise my father was. It’s too bad that mentally speaking, George W Bush is still a teenager.

Kindasleezzy goes on and Boxer keeps slapping her down:

RICE: …[W]e went to war not because of aluminum tubes. We went to war because this was the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a man against whom we had gone to war before, who threatened his neighbors, who threatened our interests, who was one of the world’s most brutal dictators. And it was high time to get rid of him, and I’m glad that we’re rid of him.

BOXER: You sent them in there because of weapons of mass destruction. Later, the mission changed when there were none. I have your quotes on it. I have the president’s quotes on it.

And everybody admits it but you that that was the reason for the war. And then, once we’re in there, now it moves to a different mission, which is great. We all want to give democracy and freedom everywhere we can possibly do it. But let’s not rewrite history. It’s too soon to do that.

RICE: Saddam Hussein was a threat, yes, because he was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And, yes, we thought that he had stockpiles which he did not have. We had problems with the intelligence. We are all, as a collective polity of the United States, trying to deal with ways to get better intelligence.

But it wasn’t just weapons of mass destruction. He was also a place — his territory was a place where terrorists were welcomed, where he paid suicide bombers to bomb Israel, where he had used Scuds against Israel in the past.

And so we knew what his intentions were in the region; where he had attacked his neighbors before and, in fact, tried to annex Kuwait; where we had gone to war against him twice in the past. It was the total picture, Senator, not just weapons of mass destruction, that caused us to decide that, post-September 11th, it was finally time to deal with Saddam Hussein.

BOXER: Well, you should read what we voted on when we voted to support the war, which I did not, but most of my colleagues did. It was WMD, period. That was the reason and the causation for that, you know, particular vote.

Once again, it is the Repugnican inability to distinguish between process and results No one disputes that Saddam was a bad guy, a brutal dictator, that he hated his neighbors, that he wished he had WMD’s, that he once used gas on Kurds, that he launched scuds against Israel.

But it is only your administration that made the decision to go to war based on the “total picture” (a picture which certainly includes an eye toward the world’s second-largest reserves of oil and an enviable strategic position for American military bases.) We, the people, and the Congress were never given the chance to vote on the “total picture”. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz infamously said:

WOLFOWITZ: For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, [as justification for invading Iraq] because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.

One issue, Dr. Rice. One. WMD’s. Saddam had ’em and we were in imminent danger. We had to go to war right now; we couldn’t wait, as you once said, “for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”. If Saddam was so awful, if he was welcoming terrorists, if his intentions were so dangerous, then that should have been your case to send our boys to war. Then we could have, as a people, decided if those threats were reasonable enough to justify 1365 American lives and $225,000,000,000 of taxpayer money. Maybe we still would have gone to war, but probably we would not, as Wolfowitz was so able to foresee.

However, I do want to thank the Bush misAdministration for the new doctrine of “Do what you want, use any excuse to get your way, then in the face of overwhelming evidence against your excuse, re-justify it later with new excuses.” Based on this principle, I’m going to tell my wife that I’m dying of prostate cancer, I’ve only got three days to live, and the doctors say the only cure is a threesome with Rosario Dawson and Halle Berry. She despises the idea of me breaking my wedding vows, but she desperately wants to keep me alive, so she agrees. Later, when she discovers that I never had cancer in the first place, I’ll tell her that the cancer wasn’t the only reason for the extramarital boinking. I had to sleep with those fine actresses because they needed to research a role in which they schtupp a middle-aged, overweight opinion columnist and that it is always a good thing to spread orgasmic bliss to the farthest corners of the hottie-actress world. (Orgasm is on the march!) Besides, Halle just went through a painful divorce? Can we just sit by while an innocent woman suffers? And it wasn’t my fault about the whole cancer story; I merely got some faulty intelligence from my doctors.