I understand that Bill Clinton was far from a perfect President, let alone a perfect husband and Christian. In fact, it is clear that for much of his marriage, he's been a pretty poor husband. And I would not want to excuse his affair with Monica or the way he lied about it to the country. That was all wrong and showed a significant defect in character.
Still did the man really deserve to be impeached for lying to a court about his sex life? When you consider what a distraction this was to the real issues of his presidency (like, for example, hunting down a terrorist named Osma Bin Laden) and how minimal his descretion was vis-a-vis the way he carried out his oath of office, you might come to think that punishing his wrongdoing wasn't worth the damage that his impeachment would do to the country or to the office of the president.
Compare Clinton's case with that of our current President. I'll buy that President Bush was sincere in leading us to war--he was trying (I believe) to do what was in the best interest of the country. (Although, from the reporting of Bob Woodward it seems that his primary reason for wanting to go to war had more to do with a desire to build a democracy in the cradle of the Middle East rather than concern over WMD, although there was undoubtedly that too.) But his over-confidence and arrogance led him to not consider all the intelligence with the seriousness it deserved. He oversaw a Defense Department that made no plausible plans for the protracted war that was to come. He instituted policy of tapping phone calls of American citizens without gaining even post facto warrants. He's ruined our reputation as a nation that protects human rights by his blatantly declaring that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to the prisoners we take. Bush has done all of this and has not had to worry about impeachment. Now I ask you, which is worse: leading a country to a pre-emptive war without paying attention to all the relevant intelligence and violating the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens (when getting post facto warrants was always a possibility if he only cared to) or lying about oral sex?
The question answers itself.
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He oversaw a Defense Department that made no plausible plans for the protracted war that was to come.
I've heard this line in various forms, but for the life of me I'm not sure how any administration can plan ahead for every contingency of a war.
Take football for example - a good analogy for war! - Charlie Weiss of the Notre Dame Fightin' Irish scripts the first twenty plays or so that his offense is going to run. After that it's back to the drawing board. Why? Because the course of the game and the flow of play is never very predictable.
If Bush's administration didn't plan for this or that contingency I say, "So, what?" I consider this a micro-criticism, or in other words: nitpicking. I think critics would be hard pressed to find a war-time President who knew everything that was going to happen five years into a war and had detailed and exhaustive plans to handle it.
Wow, a reader! Thanks for showing up, Jonathan.
From both Rumsfeld's words and from Woodward's second book on Bush at war (the name escapes me at this moment), it seems clear that there was one primary expectation: the Iraqis would see us as liberators once we overthrew Saddam. Getting him out of power would be the only (potentially) hard part. This was naive to the extreme.
I agree that no one can be expected to foresee every contingency. But foreseeing that Islamic Iraqis might not think of American troops as benign liberators, and that the Shiites and Sunni Iraqis might not particularly like each other and might fight for power doesn't take any great genius. Yet it is more than the current Administration could see (although there were those in both the State Department and Pentagon who recognized the ignorance of their superiors but were in no position to do anything about it).
As for Woodward, it's going to be a tough sell to convince me of his objectivity.
Regarding Rumsfeld, I have heard them replay the quote where he says that he believed that we would be treated as liberators. But I also remember many different statements by both Bush and Rumsfeld that it was not going to be easy and that it would be a prolonged process. In fact, from the beginning I remember that Bush/Remy would always counter the Democrats suggestion that we get out of Iraq by saying that democracy and stability would take time. I remember them saying this repeatedly from the beginning - bracing our country for a an indefinite presence in Iraq.
And even if you think back to the first time we arrived there were many who did greet us as liberators. I'm sure you recall the statue of Saddam being pulled down to the ground and people cheering the fact that America had toppled the regime.
I think the intention of R. in saying that we would be greeted as liberators was not to say that we would have an easy time of it, I think he was merely stating that the people were under oppression and would be glad to see Saddam go. Establishing a new government was always the X-factor and the unknown variable. Look at the turmoil in the U.S. to establish our own democracy. Even a century later we still had to fight a bloody civil war, and then another century later a battle for civil rights.
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