by Mark Silva
By any measure, Scott McClellan has done an extraordinary thing.
A man who served the sitting president for more than five years in the White House and helped him get there from Texas -- and who defended the president's most controversial stances at war and at home along the way - has stepped down, stepped back and now stepped out to accuse President Bush of running "a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people'' and of "shading the truth.''
"When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so,'' writes McClellan, author of What Happened, Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.
"I know the president pretty well,'' writes the Texan who went to work for the governor of Texas in January 1999 with an eye on an inspiring presidential campaign. "I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war - more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens dead - he would have never made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly today...
"An even more fundamental problem was the way his advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,'' he writes. "It goes to an important question that critics have raised about the president. Is Bush intellectually curious or, as some assert, actually stupid?... Bush is plenty smart enough to be president. But as I've noted, his leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate. His intellectual curiosity tends to be centered on knowing what he needs in order to effectively articulate, advocate and defend his policies.''
Now McClellan's motivation for all of this is another story. Clearly this was the political equivalent of a lover spurned - a onetime admirer of Bush and the promise that he held for the White House who says he still respects the man yet who clearly suffers from the pain of the deception he was required to deliver from the podium of the West Wing press briefing room. Karl Rove told him he wasn't involved in the Valerie Plame CIA identity leak, so McClellan said so at the podium. Andy Card, the president's then-chief of staff, told McClellan to assert the same thing about Lewis "Scooter'' Libby, the vice president's chief of staff who later was convicted of obstruction of justice.
And, in light of the president's adamant assertions that anyone who had taken part in such a leak of classified information had "no place'' in the White House, the former spokesman professes further pain in the revelation that Bush himself secretly authorized a release of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate - "yeah, I did,'' Bush told him aboard Air Force One in April 2006 - to be used against critics. This was part of a campaign to "discredit'' Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who publicly accused the White House of manipulating pre-war intelligence, McClellan writes -- "In June 2003, the campaign to undermine Joe Wilson's credibility as a critic of the White House... was beginning.''
Regardless of the motivation or veracity of a former senior aide and confidant to the president who tells us now that he was misleading us then - and some have suggested that his motivation lies in the cover price of this tell-all - the mere telling of this tale by a former insider who effectively is corroborating all of the harshest criticism of the administration that outsiders, chiefly Democrats, have been making for a few years now will become a permanent and not minor footnote in the historic record of this presidency.
The fact that the White House had an obligatory look at the text before publication - required reading for the National Security Council in assuring that one who had a high security clearance has not divulged something improper - and that the Bush team present and past had time to make a case against this book, and that the best they could come up with is, "This is not the Scott we knew,'' also speaks volumes.
The sitting press secretary, Dana Perino, who was hired by McClellan to work inside the White House, simply says that the major premise of the book is not true: Bush pursued the invasion of Iraq in honest concern for the perceived danger that Saddam Hussein posed. Rove says that McClellan has not proven his own case.
Perhaps nothing is refutable when one writes of motivation and intent. Yet, like the closing arguments before a jury, McClellan's will long remain in the minds of those casting judgment on the intentions, successes and failures of this administration for years to come. And for an erstwhile insider, casting a critical eye on an administration that lacks no critics on the outside, that is an extraordinary accomplishment.
