by smintheus
Wed Jan 30, 2008 at 04:16:53 PM PST
Former Senator and former Republican Lincoln Chafee has a memoir that won't go down well with the political establishment in Washington of either party. According to Scott MacKay, who saw an advance copy, Chafee excoriates George Bush and Republican extremists as well as the Iraq-war enablers among the Democrats.
There's little in his criticisms of Republican leaders that readers here would find surprising or controversial. Chafee does say that he should have left the party when Sen. Jeffords did, but stayed because he feared RI would suffer reprisals from Bush and GOP congressional leaders just as Vermont had after Jeffords' defection.
He has a lot to say about the rush to war in Iraq. Chafee asked for a private briefing with top CIA officials about the evidence on Iraqi WMD. And just as Robin Cook had discovered on the opposite side of the Atlantic when he got a similar briefing on Feb. 20, 2003, it was transparent that the "evidence" was garbage. Chafee also implies that the CIA analysts knew that all too well.
“What they had, I discovered as the meeting stretched into an hour, was next to nothing,” recalls Chafee. “They showed me what they had with little comment and no enthusiasm." Someone handed me one of the infamous aluminum tubes, the kind we were told Saddam was using to enrich weapons-grade uranium while plotting mushroom clouds over America, the ‘smoking gun’ that Condoleezza Rice warned about.
“I looked at the aluminum tube, looked at the analysts and thought, I can go buy one of these at Adler’s Hardware,” the Providence hardware emporium, writes Chafee.
So why did any Democrats buy this pathetic propaganda being peddled by Bush & Co.? Essentially it was due to political cowardice, he says. The netroots have been saying this for years, though it's interesting to see it being acknowledged by some who had an inside view.
“The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were,” writes Chafee. “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom...
Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”...
A bewildered Chafee, seeking an explanation, turned to an unnamed Democratic senator who opposed the war but was well-respected by his party’s leaders. This senator tells Chafee “in confidence” what concerned the Democrats. “They are afraid the war will be over as fast as Gulf One. Few will die, the oil will flow and gasoline will cost 90 cents a gallon.”
I wonder where these Senators obtain their political memories from, I really do, because they should ask for a refund. How could they possibly have been unaware that voters did not exact a political penalty from those who'd voted against authorizing the first Gulf War? This is the worst kind of political cowardice - stupid, uninformed cowardice.
Incidentally the unnamed Senator reportedly was Jack Reed (RI), though both Chafee and Reed refuse to confirm or deny it.
Chafee remains contemptuous of Democrats who helped Bush to gin up this unnecessary invasion.
That includes New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom Chafee says put her presidential ambitions above standing up to Mr. Bush and the rush to war in Iraq.
“I find it surprising now, in 2008, how many Democrats are running for president after shirking their constitutional duty to check and balance this president,” writes Chafee...
“They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”
The group Chafee admires the most, it turns out, are the voters of RI - for voting him out of office. That's right, he thinks it was the best thing for his state and the nation that Republicans lost control of Congress.
“The system works best when power remains in the hands of the voters,” writes Chafee. “I was a casualty of the system working in 2006, and while defeat is never easy, I give the voters credit: They made the connection between electing even popular Republicans at the cost of leaving the Senate in the hands of a leadership they had learned to mistrust.”
A shame that all this candor and self-awareness came, or came out, so late
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/30/191653/018/37/444394
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