Friday, November 18, 2005
Editorial: Exercising accountability
If Congress refuses to seek the truth about whether President Bush distorted intelligence to sell a war, voters may hold members responsible.
From the RoundTable blog
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The war in Iraq has reached a critical political juncture. The American people are growing increasingly disillusioned with the fight and the prospects for long-term success, and increasingly mistrustful of the president who led the nation into the battle.
A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 57 percent of the American people believe President Bush misled them when he made the case for invading Iraq.
The same poll found that two-thirds of the American people disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq.
Congressional Republicans, facing mid-term elections in less than a year, have taken note of the public's shift in attitude. Republican leaders in the Senate introduced and passed a resolution calling for 2006 to be "a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty ... thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq."
Bush has also gone on the offensive. This week, he and Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly attacked Democrats for attempting to "rewrite history" by claiming the administration overstated the intelligence related to the nature and imminence of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
In many ways, this is all a distraction, this war of words over who said what and when about the danger posed by Saddam, and whether it was reasonable to believe he possessed the weapons of mass destruction that most observers now realize he did not.
How and why the nation got into this war is less immediately important than how and when the nation can get out of it without leaving a dangerously destabilized and chaotic Iraq that would inevitably replace Afghanistan as a safe harbor for terrorists.
But the American people are also owed accountability. The families of the 2,080 -- and increasing -- soldiers killed in Iraq are owed accountability.
If the American system of checks and balances were operating properly, more of the questions now being asked would have been answered before Congress authorized the use of force.
But, partly because Bush and his adviser Karl Rove wanted to use that vote as an issue in the 2002 congressional elections, the tough questions didn't get asked then.
Despite that lapse, they need to be answered now.
And the responsibility still falls to Congress to find those answers. The Republican leadership has been hesitant to rigorously scrutinize a Republican president. But the recent resolution demanding some sort of exit strategy from Bush may be a sign of Republican realization that a failure to hold the president to account could have consequences. The electorate, after all, will have an opportunity in less than a year to hold them accountable.
The American people deserve the truth -- whether that truth is that President Bush presented the evidence as honestly and completely as possible or that he deliberately distorted the intelligence to scare the nation into war.
If the Republicans who control Congress, and its investigatory powers, won't make a dedicated effort to discover that truth, then the responsibility for ensuring accountability will fall to the American voters on Election Day 2006.
