What Did We Know and When Did We Know It?

As America revisits the rationales for war in the aftermath of Plamegate, the topic of revisionist history has been repeatedly highlighted in the mainstream media . A barrage of charges has been hurled into the public forum these past several months, emanating from Left and Right alike, that Bush Administration and Democratic leaders are engaging in “Cover Your Ass” revisionist historical accounting.

It got me thinking. Just what is it that we were actually thinking and saying back then? And what is it that we have simply come to believe we were thinking and saying? That curiosity, along with a personal desire to be intellectually honest in myself as I continue to oppose the Bush Administration’s militaristic impulses, provoked me to poke my head back in to old email bins and review correspondences from those days just before “Shock and Awe” streamed American might across a billion television screens worldwide.

After reviewing that correspondence, what most strikes me with respect to current day rhetoric, even more so than the continuing lack of transparency and seemingly deliberate obfuscation of the Bush “cabal,” is the constant Democratic refrain these days that “we didn’t know then the things we know now.” By and large I see more clearly than ever, after reviewing my own thinking, and knowing that I was not alone, that we did know then much of what we now know, or at least we knew enough then to know that we weren’t sure. The truth was out there, or at least plausible alternative views were, for anyone willing to look for it beyond the Bush Administration spoon-fed front pages of the New York Times.

We knew that we believed Iraq had WMDs, not that they had them. We knew, or felt strongly, that we would only find out “yay” or “nay” if Saddam Hussein were to be confronted with credible use of force. We knew then, based on the available, now discredited, intelligence, that Congress did not vote for “war,” but had authorized war only as a last resort if weapons inspections failed. That’s what we knew even if that sinking feeling in our guts told us the Dems had just given away the store and turned the prospect of violence into the inevitability of it... Read More