Obsession

Just prior to the Iraq War, the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made a speech at the UN in which he laid out the intelligence that made clear that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. This was a principal basis for the American invasion of Iraq that followed shortly after that.

Powell, of course, later claimed that he had been given faulty intelligence. But the media, nevertheless, went to town on him for years and years. How could he have made the statements that he did when the intelligence was so faulty? Who was responsible for the intelligence mistakes?

But it was not just the media that went after the faulty intelligence and the secretary of state. The Democrats in Congress who had supported the start of the war turned against it by 2006 and began a steady drumbeat of complaints about "lies" that got us into the fight. Remember Hilary Clinton telling General Petreus that to accept his testimony about the need for the surge and the basis for the war, one would have to suspend disbelief? Remember all those speeches from Obama about his opposition to the war? That is just the tip of the iceberg.

Well now, the sides have flipped. Currently, the person spouting falsehoods who is the focus of the debate is Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN and the likely nominee to be Secretary of State. Rice claims that she was just repeating faulty intelligence that she was given about the terror attack in Benghazi that resulted in the killing of the American ambassador and three others. Of course, there is a major difference between Powell telling the UN about WMDs and Rice telling America that there was no terror attack: Powell had no reason to know that what he was saying was wrong. On the other hand, Rice clearly knew that what she was saying was most likely false. After all, by the time that Rice began her TV appearances to promote the lie that it was a video that had caused the attack, the president of Libya had already gone on tv to announce that this had been a terror attack, the director of the CIA has sent a report that said the same thing, and there had already been secret testimony to Congress from the DNI that this was most likely a terror attack. For Rice to tell America over and over that there was no credible evidence that terrorists were involved was just a lie.

Today, however, the White House says that the upset from various Republican senators about Rice's lies to the American people is a "political obsession". Not so! It is nothing like what the Democrats themselves did when they were on the other side. It is simply an attempt to try to have a leader for the State Department who knows the difference between truth and a lie. It is an attempt to have a Secretary of State who can recognize reality. Much has been said about the fact that Rice is a black woman so the opposition is sexist and racist. While this is all phony stuff, it is even worse than phony. If American foreign policy and national security are to be determined under some phony politically correct methodology, we are all in danger.

Obama would do himself a big favor if he did not nominate Rice to be Secretary of State.