Awkward

Trotsky posted a great piece today on his blog, from which I have unapologetically ganked most of this.

Scott McClellan, the ex-Press Secretary to President Bush, will release a book on Monday criticizing the administration he served for four years regarding their rationale for the War in Iraq. What did McClellan have to say?

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq," McClellan wrote. "Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

Misplaced? Alright, but just how misplaced was it?

In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw "his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness," something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.

The president's real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East," McClellan wrote.

"Rather than open this Pandora's Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth," he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used "innuendo and implication" and "intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary."

"President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," McClellan concluded, noting, "The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president's entire second term in office."

To quote Trotsky, "Dang...so....wait....you mean this guy, who was the spokesman for the Bush White House for all that time, is coming out and basically saying what we all already knew? That we knew those WMDs were imaginary, and it was all a huge lie? Well...that's just embarrassing."

Not that it makes that big of a difference now. Those who are interested in what is true regarding the War in Iraq succumbed to the evidence long ago (Indeed, some of us have been shouting it from the rooftops since day 1). For the rest of the loyal Conservatives who believe that changing their opinion is matter of defeat rather than enlightenment, anything short of a confession from Bush's very lips wouldn't be enough. So yet another confession from a man who was once a faithful employee of Bush, and who remains a supporter, will be unlikely to change anything aside from making those of us who are sick of this situation and the loss of life attached to it shake our heads a little harder.

And our soldiers continue to die. How can we not hold the man who sent them there accountable?