Thursday, May 29, 2008

Scott McClellan's non-event: All this was already broadly known

The new dust-up over Scott McClellan’s new book declaring that the Bush administration “oversold” the Iraq situation in order to justify a “pre-emptive” attack is really a non-event. What McClellan is saying has been known for a long time. The problem for the Bush administration – which has hastened to reject MeClellan’s claims – is that this news comes from one of its own, one of the inner circle. Everyone in that group could not have missed the deliberate attempt by the administration to sell the attack in the face of world opposition and in the absence of concrete evidence for its claims. Those claims – now clearly known to be false – were reiterated many times.

3 comments:

Jeff Wills said...

Dr Canfield,

To say that McClellan was a member of Bush's "inner circle," is just not true. As Press Secretary McClellan had limited access to high level meetings and discussions about Iraq. He was not a policy advisor, and he was not someone anyone was going to for any advice. He is disgruntled; that is just the plain truth on that. And, he was a lousy Press Secretary on top of that. But then, besides Tony Snow, Bush has never had a good Press Secretary. It always seems to go to second raters.

Bob said...

Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your correction. Best, Bob

Jeff Wills said...

No need to play the Socratic. My comments are not a correction, just an opinion. That's all.