http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-...h_b_75089.html

David Fiderer
Chris Matthews Rewrites History about the Clintons and the Origins of
the Iraq War

On last Wednesday's Hardball, Chris Matthews asked a rhetorical
question that no one answered. So I will.

"I'm amazed now that Bill Clinton has come out and said he's Jerry
Rubin. I mean, he's now become -- announced the fact that he's been
against the war -- I love the phrase, "from the beginning." Within a
few hours, by the way, the verb -- the verb tense changed from the
past to the present. This is like the old "is" is question. He's now
against the war, having promised the voters a few minutes before that
that he was against it. Now he's just saying he is against it, a
lesser claim. I don't remember him speaking out against the war back
in 2001, 2002 and 2003, do you?"

I sure do. A few minutes on a fee-based search engine jogged my
memory. Here are few clippings:

"Clinton Splits With Bush on Iraq," The Washington Post March 13, 2003
"Former president Bill Clinton, who has generally supported the Bush
administration's Iraq policy in recent remarks, called on his
successor yesterday to accept a more relaxed timeline in exchange for
support from a majority of the United Nations Security Council
members. ..[T]he former president has publicly espoused an approach
substantially different from the administration's public stance."

"Deadline for war - Give the inspectors more time, urges Clinton" The
Daily Telegraph March 13, 2003 "Bill Clinton yesterday urged the Bush
administration to give Hans Blix as much time as he wants to complete
weapons inspections in Iraq. The former president broke ranks with his
successor...Mr Clinton said war might yet be avoided if Saddam Hussein
were given more time to disarm. "

"Clinton recommends U.S. patience on Iraq," Reuters, February 11,
2003. "Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said in an interview
broadcast on Tuesday the United States should exercise patience in its
standoff with Iraq to help build allied support for a potential
strike."

Hardball, February 12, 2003,when Chris Matthews asks "Christopher
Hitchens, are you upset that President Clinton has emerged as a critic
and perhaps a mild-mannered critic of the policy of this
administration on the eve of war?"

Let me spell it out for anyone who doesn't get it. If you say the
country should not go to war until certain conditions are met, or if
you say there is insufficient basis for going to war, then you are
against going to war. (Nobody is ever indifferent). This concept holds
true if you're referring to war with Iraq, Iran or Mexico. Bill
Clinton's position, which was identical to that of Hans Blix, was that
we should exhaust all opportunities for inspections prior to any
military action. And if, five days before the invasion, Clinton said
that we should proceed with inspections and diplomacy instead of
artillery fire, then he was against the war from "the beginning." It's
the simplest type of syllogism.

Matthews was not the only one. Most of Bill Clinton's critics framed
their accusations in ways that are very misleading. The headline in
the Times said "Bill Clinton Flatly Asserts He Opposed War at Start."
Yes, Clinton used the verb "opposed" instead of "was against" which
have very different meanings. But to my knowledge, you cannot "flatly
assert" something in a subordinate clause. The full sentence, which
the Times quotes at the very end of the article, was,

"Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the
beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the
opportunity to support those soldiers."

Clinton's primary point was about his opportunity to support the
soldiers, specifically about the adminsitration's unwillingness to
work with him, not about Iraq. If Clinton substituted the word
"opposed" with "was against" his sentence would have been 100%
correct. But would the audience have been left with a materially
different impression? Did Clinton "rewrite history" or make a bad
choice of words? If the media chooses to make a big deal out of it,
who's the one who's splitting hairs?

Which is why methinks Frank Rich doest protest too much. In Sunday's
column, he writes that Clinton "revived unhappy memories of the truth-
dodging nadirs of the Clinton White House," and that "history cannot
be rewritten in any case, by Bill Clinton or anyone else." Rich
revived my unhappy memories of pundits who relied on the flimsiest
pretext to impugn the Clintons.

While we're on the topic of rewriting history, let's consider how
pervasively the media conflates the October 2002 vote on the joint
resolution with Bush's decision to invade. Whenever Hillary Clinton
attempts to point out a bona fide distinction, pundits dissemble big
time. Matthews' sleight of hand is obvious in this Hardball segment
which opened with a clip from Meet the Press,

TIM RUSSERT, "MEET THE PRESS": Is it fair to say that the most
important vote you cast in the Senate, in your own words, on
authorizing the war in Iraq, was wrong?
SEN. CLINTON: It's fair to say that the president misused the
authority that he was given, and if I had the opportunity to act now,
based on what I know now, I never would have voted that way.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: The problem with that, Anne Kornblut, is what she knew when
she cast the vote authorizing the war is that 80 percent of the
American people believed that Bush was taking us to war at that time.
At that time, she knew that most people believed--she may not have--
overwhelmingly, people knew Bush was gunning for a war, and approving
the war, authorizing it, meant we were going to war. What does she
mean by saying, I didn't know he was going to abuse it? I mean, that's
what he asked for. If I say, Can I borrow your car, you're going to
drive it.

KORNBLUT: This has been the sort of...(LAUGHTER) This has been the
sort of inherent problem with this answer for her all along. And it's
been a calculated risk on her part. She would rather give this answer
that, to you and to some others, might seem convoluted, might seem
verging on dishonest, because...

MATTHEWS: Yes.

KORNBLUT: ... of course, a lot of people thought that it was going to
lead to war.


Neat trick, huh? In order to make Senator Clinton look dishonest,
Matthews and Kornblut bypass the text of the resolution, which imposed
certain conditions prior to any military action - conditions Bush
subsequently ignored. Matthews and Kornblut buy into the Republican
narrative - that our knowledge about the WMD threat and Bush's
intentions never really changed between October 2002 and March 2003.
Both of these phony implications - "If you voted for the resolution,
you voted to go to war" or "We all relied on faulty intelligence." -
are commonplace deceptions used by Republicans, along with the
Washington press corps, to evade culpability. It's time to set the
record straight.

On October 11, 2002, the day Hillary Clinton and others in the Senate
voted on the Iraq war resolution, certain things were known, and other
things were not known.

On October 11, 2002, everyone knew:
1. The text of the resolution, which stated that prior to any military
action the President must first determine that reliance on peaceful
means will not protect the security of the US, or enforcement of UN
Security Council Resolutions,
2. The US and its allies were negotiating a UN Security Council
resolution to compel new intrusive inspections in Iraq,
3. The publicly disclosed Key Judgments from the National Intelligence
Estimate, and
4. That the neocons were talking about regime change and disparaging
the idea of inspections.

On October 11, 2002 almost no one knew:
5. The extent to which George Bush was or was not bluffing about
regime change,
6. That Colin Powell's power and authority would be neutralized by
Cheney and Rumsfeld,
7. The extent to which Cheney and Rumsfeld had short-circuited the
institutional integrity of the Pentagon and the CIA, and
8. The extent to which the NIE was based on cooked intelligence

In other words, almost no one knew the extent to which the Bush
administration was undercutting all of our administrative and
constitutional checks and balances. Even today, we don't know the
extent of it.

So on October 11, 2002, almost no one could be expected to foresee
that:
9. Bush would flagrantly abuse the discretion afforded him under terms
of the joint resolution, specifically, his refusal to attempt to
reconcile the inspectors' intelligence with the NIE, prior to the
invasion, and
10. That Bush's agreement to proceed with the inspections process was
a sham from the beginning.

And what was Hillary Clinton in the months after her vote?

"Hillary Clinton tells Irish TV she is against war with Iraq," Irish
Times, February 8, 2003

"Hillary Clinton prefers 'peaceful solution' in Iraq," Associated
Press March 3, 2003
"[Clinton said the US] should continue its attempts to build an
international alliance rather than going to war quickly with Iraq...
[i]nspection is preferable to war, if it works, the New York Democrat
said."

On March 18, 2003, everyone (who was willing to look) knew with
substantial certainty that:
11. UN inspections had discredited the NIE,
12. The White House made no effort to reconcile the inspectors
findings with their prior intelligence assumptions,
13. The White House offered nothing substantive to refute the
inspectors' findings,
14. Hans Blix said the inspectors, who found nothing that presented
even a remote danger to the US or Europe, could complete their work in
a matter of months,
15. George Bush had promised to call for another Security Council vote
to invade, and ("Everyone will show their cards,") and totally
disregarded that promise a few days later,
16. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and others said their
was insufficient basis for launching a war at that time
17. Most of our allies were - including Britain - also advocating more
time for the inspections to be completed, and
18. And that mainstream media never seriously considered or reported
Numbers 11 through 16 above.

Put another way, Number 18 meant that, at a time in the world when a
journalist's professionalism and integrity counted most, Helen Thomas
stood virtually alone in the Beltway press corps, courageously asking
hard questions while surrounded by cowards. Tim Russert's sycophancy
stands out because he repeatedly lied about the inspectors.

To this day, Chris Matthews forgets about the elephant in the room. He
interviewed White House speech writer Michael Gerson, John McCain, and
George Tenet, each of whom repeated the canard that they believed at
the time of the invasion that Saddam had WMD. Matthews never
referenced the reports by Blix and ElBaradei, which prove that their
"beliefs" were based on a reckless indifference to the truth.

When interviewing Tenet on May 7, 2007 Matthews said,

"Most Americans were for this war for two reasons: one, payback -- it
was even in our country music, 'Remember How You Felt?' -- and the
fear of a nuclear weapon, that they actually had a delivery system,
this balsam wood plan they were going to use to bring over here and
attack us with."
And you know why they believed that? Because Chris Matthews and
glossed over information that put us all on notice. On March 7, 2003,
ElBaradei said, "The IAEA has yet to come across evidence of a nuclear
weapons program. "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have
to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a
nuclear weapons program in Iraq.""

We knew enough on March 7, 2003, months before Joe Wilson spoke out or
David Kay's inspectors began snooping around. You know why we knew?
Because the administration offered nothing in rebuttal and because
their reliance on such a crude forgery showed that they were
incompetent. It's plain common sense which Matthews and others failed
to consider then or now.

To bring things back full circle, Bill Clinton made a comment that was
90% accurate, Hillary Clinton made comments that were 100% accurate,
yet they are accused by the media chronically feeding us doubletalk.
You what to know what real doubletalk is? Check out Howard Kurtz'
interview with Tom Brokaw:

HOWARD KURTZ: Most people would say, and I would agree, the media did
a pretty poor job during the run-up to the Iraq War in terms of the
way that President Bush was selling it, and now, of course, the
coverage in recent years has been more critical.
BROKAW: Yes. The one thing I would disagree with you about, a lot of
what happened on the run-up was unknowable. People did believe he had
weapons of mass destruction. People who were critical of the war and
the idea of going to war did in fact think that he had weapons of mass
destruction, which was one of the bases for...

KURTZ: But shouldn't journalists have been more skeptical toward the
line the administration was selling, even if they couldn't disprove it
and given it more...

BROKAW: I think on the execution... (CROSSTALK)

BROKAW: I think on the war plan they should have been a lot more
skeptical.

KURTZ: And given more space, more air time to opposition voices? There
was a feeling... (CROSSTALK)

BROKAW: Yes, but remember -- you have to remember, the opposition
voices were not that many in this town, for example, in Washington.
There just weren't that many....


"Not that many opposition voices in this town"? How about 230 miles
north in New York, where Brokaw lived and worked? Did Brokaw
conveniently forget the names Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei?

Arianna and Keith Olbermann perfectly dissected Karl Rove's
transparent and ugly lies about the beginning of the Iraq war. But at
the end of the day, it's the historical whitewashing by Chris Matthews
and Tom Brokaw that poses a far greater danger to our political
discourse. Not because it maligns the Clintons, but because it
obstructs our ability to look at cause and effect or any individual's
responsibility. And because it remains the conventional wisdom.

Addendum: (11:40 pm) The piece was not intended as a wholesale defense
of Hillary Clinton's October 2002 vote, or of Bill Clinton's public
statements during the run up to the war. Rather it was about how the
press dismisses any valid points they wish to make. And Senator
Clinton's point in particular reminds us that everyone was put on
notice about the absence of WMD before we invaded. In other words, the
fact that George Tenet told Bush, "It's a slam dunk!" was totally
irrelevant when Woodward published his book. And any suggestion that
Bush made an honest mistake, or that we did not know better, is a
pervasive and very dangerous canard.

edspyhill01@yahoo.com wrote:
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-...h_b_75089.html
>
> David Fiderer
> Chris Matthews Rewrites History about the Clintons and the Origins of
> the Iraq War

Snipped for space / / / /

Great piece. Thanks. I saw Matthews on BookTv over the weekend. He
says that until recently when he was given the positions of producer and
director (something like that) for his show and has sole responsibility
for its content. Prior to that the network had control and in the run
up to the invasion of Iraq any attempts to critique the Bush's policy's
were shot down.

In message news:1d8c4e40-563a-4918-9d70-
28eccbc61dbb@s36g2000prg.googlegroups.com, edspyhill01@yahoo.com sprach
forth the following:

> In order to make Senator Clinton look dishonest,

....one only need cite the words coming out of her mouth.