And I Blame You

Untitled

And I Blame You

In 1961, after the embarrassing defeat of the CIA-led invasion force at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy addressed the nation and the world and apologized for the fiasco. Before the year was out, he asked for and received the resignations of CIA Director Allan W. Dulles and other top CIA officials. However, he made it clear that he, the President, was ultimately accountable.

Not long after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy remarked, "There is an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." Not so with Kennedy - he accepted full responsibility for a humiliating military, political, and public relations disaster.

In 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration marketed its invasion of Iraq as a pre-emptive act of self defense - we had to attack Iraq before Iraq could attack us with its vast arsenal of WMDs. The administration based its claims of Iraq's WMDs on intelligence reports, which left "no doubt" about the existence of those WMDs.

By the end of 2004, it had become embarrassingly clear even to the most credulous Bush supporters that, contrary to the CIA's slam-dunk intelligence, there were no WMDs to be found. President Bush's response was an entirely appropriate one for the Bizzaro world of the Bush administration - he conferred upon former CIA Director George Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can achieve.

This month, when the Bush administration officially ended its search for those mythical WMDs, some accountability for the invasion of Iraq was clearly called for. Who did President Bush hold accountable?

You.

An Accountability Moment

Last week, the Washington Post asked President Bush why no one is being held accountable for mistakes made before and after the invasion of Iraq, including the embarrassingly elusive WMDs. The President responded, "Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

There you have it. No matter if the administration made mistakes that led to this war. No matter even if the administration intentionally misled us into this war. By November, 2004, the falseness of the claims used to justify the invasion were apparent to all but the most stubborn Bush supporters. And by nevertheless re-electing George Bush, the burden of responsibility for this war, with all its horrors, has shifted from the Bush administration to the American public.

This is your war now, like it or not. And your President just wanted to make sure the fact didn't elude you like all those WMDs.