Frank Gaffney Blames Kerry for the Mess in Iraq!!
Reported by Marie Therese - October 21, 2004 -
On the October 20, 2004 O'Reilly Factor, during a discussion of Iraq between Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowments, and Frank Gaffney, former Assistant Defense Secretary under Reagan and current President of the Center for Security Policy, Mr. Gaffney accused John Kerry of being responsible for the disaster in Iraq.
Bill O'Reilly began his show as always with his Talking Points Memo. He said: "But on his [Bush's] watch, U.S. intelligence has let us down three times: failing to stop 9/11, faulty analysis on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and a bumbling plan to pacify Iraq after Saddam fell. Those three catastrophes and they are that, have hurt America badly.
The question is do we hold Mr. Bush responsible? I say no on 9/11 and WMD's. No sitting president, I believe, could have known what would happen in those situations, based upon the CIA's nonperformance on 9/11 and disastrous prediction regarding WMD's. But the aftermath of Iraq is troubling. Enough people, including Secretary of State Powell and Brent Scowcroft, foreign policy advisor to Bush the elder, warned the president that Iraq could be a perfect chaotic storm.
Mr. Bush preferred to believe other analysts, many from the already- discredited CIA who told him the Iraqi people would be with the USA. Some of them are but most have not helped us out. So the president is essentially tied with John Kerry with 13 days to go. If the aftermath of Iraq had gone well, Mr. Bush would be up by 10 or more points, I believe.
But now it comes down to you, whether you believe the president has learned from past mistakes or not. John Kerry has not offered much on Iraq or the terrorism front. So it all comes down to whether we the people think the president has learned enough in this very trying time to protect us in the future. (End of excerpt.)
As you can see, this memo set the tone for the rest of the show.
O'Reilly mentioned that Iraq is chaotic and asked Frank Gaffney "What kind of responsibility does Mr. Bush bear for that?"
GAFFNEY: "I think it pales, frankly, beside the responsibility that John Kerry bears."
O'Reilly: "For what?"
GAFFNEY: "Having done everything in his power over the past six months or so to promote in the minds of the terrorists in Iraq and the minds of the Iraqi people as well as a great many Americans that this really is a cart in the ditch and that the United States had best disengage as quickly as possible from it. I think that has emboldened the terrorists, has compounded the difficulties and overshadows any failure to plan that the President could realistically have made."
O'Reilly: "That's a pretty provocative thesis."
CIRINCIONE: "It's absurd to blame John Kerry for the problems we have with terrorism. The insurgency began long before the President campaign began!"
Gaffney then went on to say that, as far as the weapons of mass destruction, it "is still an open question" whether or not Saddam Hussein had them.
GAFFNEY: "We don't know where they went. We don't know when they went, wherever they went, but there was a disagreement ... dissent, they call it, technically on some points specifically regarding nuclear weapons ... The question was ... I think the President has been vindicated in terms of his judgment that Saddam Hussein was a man engaged in terror, connected to terrorist activities against the United States and with the distinct prospect that the kinds of activities he was involved in in terms of small scale WMDs, production activities related to terror, including some directly related to attacks against the United States, required the sort of action the President took..."
O'Reilly (good Catholic boy that he is) yet again absolved our Fearless Leader of any responsibility for anything to do with Iraq.
Joseph Cirincione ended the interview by saying: "The captain of the ship is the one that is held responsible for the course of that ship...He has to be held accountable and he has failed to hold others beneath him accountable."
Comment
O'Reilly's other guests were Linda Robinson, a reporter for US News and World Report, who has written a new book about American special forces called Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces" and Liz Cheney, eldest daughter of Lynne and Dick Cheney. The Cheney irehashed the Mary Cheney remark by John Kerry and regurgitated the supposed slight to stay-at-home moms by Teresa Heinz Kerry.
As for Gaffney, I guess they had to trot out someone with Reagan Republican credentials to counter the effect of Scowcroft's indictment of Bush and to help wash out the bad taste left by Pat Robertson's comments made during his interview with Paul Zahn of CNN.
