John Nichols | The Nation, May 28, 2008
The Bush administration employed propaganda techniques, political spin and deception to promote and then justify a war with Iraq that was unwise and unnecessary.
And a "too-deferential" national press corps allowed the president and his aides to get away with it.
Who makes this devastating, if not entirely new, charge?
The man responsible for spinning the story of the Bush presidency, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
In a memoir that will be published Monday, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, the veteran campaign and White House aide to George W. Bush portrays his former boss and those around him as permanent campaigners who frequently sacrificed the good of the country to achieve dubious political and policy goals.
McClellan is sharply critical of the Bush White House's handling of definitional domestic policy challenges, particularly Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
But nowhere is the former press aide so devastating in his critique of his former boss as on the issue of how the United States was steered into the quagmire that is Iraq.
Bush, he writes, is guilty of a "failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and (of) rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath."
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