Condoleezza Rice took some valuable time off from her shoe shopping tour and appeared on Meet The Press today. For the first time she was actually being honest with the American people. Whether she was doing so on purpose is another matter entirely. (see the video here) Joining Tim Russert, she said:
"But the fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaeda and perhaps after the Taliban and then our work would be done and we would try to defend ourselves. Or we could take a bolder approach, which was to say that we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle East. And there is no one who could have imagined a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein still in power."
I thought the reason we went into Iraq was because they had WMD’s? Members of the administration even outed an undercover CIA agent and smeared her husband in retaliation because somebody actually had the nerve to do a little fact checking on the lies that the White House told about Iraq's WMD capabilities. As Ari Fleisher said on 4/10/03:
"But make no mistake -- as I said earlier -- we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found."
Or as Dick Cheney said on MTP on 3/16/03:
Russert: What do you think is the most important rationale for going to war with Iraq?
VP Cheney: Well, I think I’ve just given it, Tim, in terms of the combination of his development and use of chemical weapons, his development of biological weapons, his pursuit of nuclear weapons.
What about those pesky mushroom clouds Condi touted with Wolf Blitzerr on 01/10/03:
"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Weren’t al-Qaeda and Iraq best buddies? Now, Condi finally spews the PNAC company line of changing the face of the Middle East while Osama remains at large and as Judd notes:
"...the invasion has become “a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”
So nice of you to level with the American people after all else has failed. Might a " bolder approach" have been honesty from the beginning? You should try it sometime. It's a moral value after all.