From: Rob
Date: Sat Jul 26, 2003 09:45 PM America/New_York
To: Evan Coyne Maloney
Subject: ?

Rob,

Thanks for your e-mail. I’ll address your points below...

Just reading your article when I noticed this:

“Because it is often difficult to distinguish suspicious intelligence reports from iron-clad information, human interpretation is required; inferences must be drawn.”

That might be the case, but if there was so much other evidence to support the reason to go to war, why would anything other than complete and utter “iron-clad” evidence make its way into the state of the union address? Remember, this is the president directly telling the nation why we should have gone to war. Oops. Turns out some of the stuff he said was a lie. I wonder how valid the rest of it was.

Let me take this opportunity to be clearer about one of the points in the article: I do not think there is any such thing as truly iron-clad intelligence information. So, how did information clad in something other than iron make it into the speech? Because it’s the only form of intelligence data that exists! All intelligence data comes with a certain degree of doubt; what matters is the result of “connecting the dots” between the various reports. Sometimes, when a given intelligence report turns out to be suspect, the overall mosaic created by related data remains accurate. That’s what happened in this case.

Yes, there was one specific piece of intelligence that was discredited: the report that Iraq tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. The Bush Administration was right to announce that the report was erroneous; it was the honest thing to do. But I think it was a mistake for the administration to back away from the infamous sixteen words from the State of the Union speech. I assume that’s what you’re referring to when you say “some of the stuff [Bush] said was a lie.”

A lie? Really? Let’s look at the sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.“

How is the statement a lie? First, the British government still stands by its intelligence saying that Saddam sought uranium from an African nation. Second, the British intelligence was based on more than the Niger report alone.

The furor over the sixteen words is more a result of the Bush Administration’s ham-fisted response to a media frenzy than it is the symptom of a campaign to deceive the American people about the Iraqi threat.

Remember, if you think the Bush Administration was lying about Iraq’s desire for a nuclear capability, then you must also lodge the same accusation against the Clinton Administration, the U.N., and many prominent Democrats, all of whom were making similar statements long before President Bush supposedly concocted his scheme to trick people into supporting the war.

In any case, I respectfully disagree with you. Also, I was just wondering if there was ANYTHING about Bush you don’t like? (something legitimate, don’t tell me some BS that’s really a compliment in disguise like “Well, he works so hard he doesn’t have the chance to ‘.....’ ). It seems just as some people can’t find anything to like about Bush, you can’t seem to see any fault in the guy.

Later,

Rob

I think of these as disagreements more than examples of dislike:

• I understand that we must sometimes be pragmatic in the Terror War. Nevertheless, pussyfooting around whenever the subject of Saudi Arabia comes up doesn’t seem right. By promoting Wahhabi Islam—the ideology of Osama bin Laden—Saudi Arabia incubates generations of al Qaeda adherents. Perhaps the Bush Administration is punting on the problem in the hopes that a free and prosperous Iraq would nudge Saudi Arabia and Iran out of their respective dark ages. Hopefully...but I still don’t like letting the Saudis off the hook; their duplicity continues to fuel Wahhabi terror.
• One of my original reasons for supporting President Bush was that I believed him to be a fiscal conservative and a supporter of free trade. But if he’s fiscally conservative, then why did the president allow the pork distributors in Congress to grow the federal budget by 12.4% (outpacing the growth of the economy by 5%) since taking office? And if President Bush a free-trader, why did he decide to slap new tariffs on steel?
• President Bush colluded with Ted Kennedy on the education bill. Although that in and of itself isn’t bad, the fact that it cost $26.5 billion once again calls into question the president’s credentials as a fiscal conservative. And while the system remains structurally incapable of educating America’s children, this bill attempts only modest tweaks focused on the mechanics of administering schools and measuring performance. But school choice—the only reform that allows students to escape failing schools—was thrown overboard by the White House the minute a debate seemed likely. So instead of spending more to let parents decide where their kids go to school, we’re dumping even more money into a broken system where the state dictates that certain children will be stuck in substandard schools.
• Senate Democrats are perpetuating an unprecedented constitutional crisis by blocking confirmation votes for judicial nominees who fail their ideological litmus tests. They’re doing it with the filibuster, which lets them postpone voting until 60% of the Senate calls for an end to the delay. (Some of President Bush’s nominees have been waiting over two years for a vote in the full Senate.) Although the constitution calls for nominees to be approved by a simple majority, the Democrats are using the filibuster to effectively require a 60% super-majority for the confirmation of judges. Apparently, what the Constitution says no longer matters. Never in American history has the filibuster been used prevent the Senate from voting on judges. How is this a criticism of the Bush Administration, you may ask? Because President Bush is not using his bully pulpit to fight it, and his point-man in the Senate—Majority Leader Bill Frist—isn’t mounting much of a counteroffensive either. At the very least, if the Democrats want to filibuster, they should be forced to endure the hardships of a real filibuster.
• I do not believe in racial preferences. I do not believe a colorblind society can engineered with a system that tags people by race, sorts them into groups, and then treats each cluster as an undifferentiated mass whose members share identical interests and whose success depends upon the forced sacrifice of people in some other group. How can such a system lead to anything but greater racial division, competition, and animosity? How can we as a society complain of the injustice of racial inequities and at the same time try to mend it with more racial inequity? It’s perfect political doublespeak, a term that can also be applied to President Bush’s recent stance-shuffling on affirmative action. First, his administration submitted a brief to the Supreme Court opposing affirmative action. Then, when the Supreme Court handed down a murky decision that largely left affirmative action in place, President Bush inexplicably praised it.

Some of these decisions, I suspect, were motivated more by political expedience than principle. That’s to be expected in politics, obviously. And in some cases, an idea can’t be sold before its time. But, will the time ever come for an idea that nobody bothers to articulate? Or fight for? If the Education Bill went down in flames because of a bitter battle over school choice, then at least more of the public would be aware of the issue. Then you can compromise if you must and try again for the rest next year.

Despite these disagreements, though, I still consider myself a supporter of President Bush. Why? Because he got tax cuts through, not once but twice. As someone whose conservatism is based primarily on economic concerns, the tax cuts are very satisfying.

But more important than any of the concerns above, President Bush is one of the few people with whom I feel safe entrusting the nation’s security. Ultimately, that may motivate me the most in 2004...and I’ve got a feeling I won’t be alone.

Take care,
Evan

Note: 
Shortly after posting this response, I read a strikingly relevant article by Fred Barnes on President Bush’s brand of conservative philosophy, a new type that Barnes refers to as “big government conservatism.”