My local ABC affiliate decided to preempt “This Week” yesterday morning so they could spend the hour discussing the fact that it had rained really hard the day before and some tree limbs were down. So I missed George Will criticizing Dick Cheney for what’s not in his new book:
Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years is we went to war—big war, costly war—under false pretenses. And…to write a memoir in which you say essentially nothing seriously went wrong…if I wrote a memoir of my last week, I would have things to apologize for.
This prompts C&L’s Nicole Belle to snark, “This is just another example of the after-the-fact tacit admissions of the right wing–who spent the entire decade castigating and criticizing the left for questioning why we were in Iraq, mind you–that the Bush administration did lie us into a war of choice against a nation that posed no threat. But where’s the apology for that from George Will, huh?”
Actually, like myself, Will has been questioning the Iraq War and the neocons since 2003 and pretty steadily since. He was ahead of me in saying, years ago, that the Iraq War wasn’t worth the price paid.
The notion that Cheney owes us an apology is interesting. It depends entirely on whether the Bush administration took us to war knowing Saddam did not have a nuclear weapons program or simply dowmplayed evidence casting doubt in order to make the case for war they genuinely believed was necessary.
