Newsweek editor Evan Thomas appears on the Don Imus radio program every Monday morning and is a reliable gauge of the LSM sentiment on major issues of the day. Imus spends most of his time honing his persona as a rehabilitated 60's-80's drug addict/alcoholic, who has always been cutting edge and able to spot the foibles of those who pretend to be in charge. He has been particularly acidic toward the President and the war; he repeats the casualty counts whenever talking about the war as if the sheer number of dead and wounded Americans is an indicator of the justice or wisdom of the fight. He typically joins the casualty figures to the "Bush lied" meme. Most often, he treats Bush as an intellectually challenged tool being used by the evil Cheney and the neo-cons. Evan Thomas rarely quibbles with any of the negative locutions applied to the current Administration but this morning something remarkable occurred.
The breakthrough occurred while discussing the Valerie Plame game.
Neither Imus nor Thomas have any problem describing the issue as Lewis Libby and Karel Rove outing Valerie Plame in order to punish the courageous truth-teller, Joe Wilson. Michale Barone summarizes the entire sordid affair today in The error of a political indictment, although he does not delineate the covert CIA bureaucracy effort to undermine the Bush administration which was at the heart of the affair; perhaps we will get lucky and catch some glimpses of this if and when the Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald tells us what he thinks.
(As an aside, Bob Herbert wrote about this covert fight in the Times this morning, although he probably doesn't realize he is simply taking the side of the entrenched CIA bureaucracy which was so intimately involved in our pre-9/11 intelligence failures; the Bush admin came in and recognized that the entrenched risk-averse reactionary bureaucracy had to go and were fighting to change a dysfunctional culture; keep your eyes open for Able Danger.)
However, while discussing the genesis of the Plame game, which lead to talk about the over-hyped intelligence on WMD, Thomas was surprisingly reasonable. He said that Lewis Libby truly believed, in the days after 9/11, that Saddam Hussein had WMD stockpiles and was terrified that a vial of Smallpox would somehow make its way into our country.
To Imus's attempt to characterize the intelligence manipulation as "lies", Thomas responded that from his point of view, the intelligence was merely exaggerated in order to make the case for the war. To his telling, Libby, and by extension, Cheney, Rove, and ultimately, George Bush, were not evil; they were guilty of hubris, but not iniquity. Thomas was honest enough to mention that he, too, was terrified of another (WMD) attack and supported the war, at the time. Following that revelation, Imus attempted to goad Thomas into supporting the anti-war left's position that the invasion was a disastrous mistake, having failed to get him to agree it was based on "lies." Here is where it got truly interesting. Imus insisted everyone of those "spineless weasels" [I do not know if he used those exact words, but it is in his style, so it may be "false, but accurate"-SW] should be confronted and forced to answer the question, "knowing what we know now, would you have still supported the war if you had to vote over again." Thomas answered that not only would he have again supported the war if he knew then what he knows now, but that he agreed with the Bush administration that we would have had to confront Saddam Hussein militarily sooner or later, and that it was better to do it sooner. He said even the Colin Powell wing of the administration agreed we would need to remove Hussein, but they wanted to wait until a second term and build more of an international consensus before confronting him militarily.
It is clear that this particular doyen of the liberal left LSM opposes the administration primarily because the war is not going as well as they were promised. Sadly, too few on the left are honest about the entire endeavor, especially among the LSM and their allies in the Democratic party; they have boxed themselves into a corner. Their are trapped in opposition to a war we are winning (though there is no evidence the insurgency and terrorism will stop anytime soon) and are left with a tremendous investment in our defeat. Either they have to push for immediate withdrawal (the litmus test of the Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org wing of the party) or they have to support keeping troops in Iraq for as long as it takes, at which point they can only differentiate themselves from the Bush administration by claiming they were lied to and/or the war is being run in an incompetent way. This was not a winning hand in 2004 and is unlikely to work in 2008, especially after we start bringing our troops home.
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