A Profoundly Serious Criticism

A Profoundly Serious Criticism

This is a profoundly serious criticism of the Bush Administration coming from someone who was part of it. From the May 27, 2008 Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

WASHINGTON — In a book due out Monday, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan offers a blistering review of the administration and concludes that his longtime boss misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq.
"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened," due out Monday. "No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact."
"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary," he wrote in the preface.
...

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."

Now, there's a lot of argument about the intelligence involved. I have been prepared to accept that Hussein's past history argued that if the intelligence was ambiguous, the precautionary principle would argue for taking action. And the British Parliament's Butler Report did find some serious evidence.

Still, I find myself asking this rather serious question: if, as McClellan says, he could see that Bush was intentionally misleading the nation into war back then, why didn't McClellan say anything? Why didn't he quit his job and blow the whistle? This would have been a serious malfeasance of office issue; perhaps even an impeachable offense. So why did McClellan stay in his job until forced out in 2006? One's obligations to the nation on something as momentous as going to war should take precedence over personal loyalty. It makes me wonder how much of this is that McClellan is trying to sell a book.