I'm not sure what's happening in the Bush camp, but the line seems to be changing:
Bush on the Today Show, 8/30/04:
When asked ''Can we win?'' the war on terror, Bush said, ''I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the - those who use terror as a tool are - less acceptable in parts of the world.''
Bush to Time Magazine, published 8/30/04:
Had we had to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success.
Bush to New York Times; 8/27/04
Well, it's a — it's a miscalculation of the — what the conditions would be like after a swift victory, because we never dreamt it would be that swift.
Bush can come off script pretty often, but not in planned interviews. So why the changes? Some could say he's flip-flopped. Or we could say he's finally telling the truth.
UPDATE: Daily Kos takes this on as well.
Certainly there was a will, but no way. They wanted to go to war so desperately, that we did not have the time to do the proper planning. That planning, in my opinion, involves primarily intelligence. And still now, a year and half into it, we still obviously do not have the intelligence on the ground to understand the enemy.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that this is the greatest problem in our defense. We can have the best, most powerful military in the world, but what good is it if we could not even figure out if Iraq really had WMD.
What does this mean for our approach to Iran or North Korea.
Let's stop focusing on domestic intelligence, and limiting our civil rights, and instead put a little more into the CIA.