Philip Carter at the Washington Post’s Intel Dump blog takes issue with something that President Bush said in an interview last Friday with ABC’s Martha Raddatz, about his insistence that we were winning in Iraq despite the bad news coming out of the area, back in 2006. First, here’s the part of the interview he seems to have the issue with (he quotes more, but this is the pertinent part, I think):

RADDATZ: .You were saying, ‘We’re winning. We have a plan for victory. We are winning,’ up through October.

BUSH: Well, there was — I also recognized — I think if you’d go through the — kind of fully analyze my statements, I was also saying, “The fighting is very tough, it’s — you know, the extremism is unacceptable. The murder is unacceptable.” And you know, it’s very important to be realistic.

RADDATZ: But the overall thing — when you say, “We’re winning,” you know what the American people hear. You know how that will play.

BUSH: Well, yes. I think we — and I wanted — that’s as much trying to bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well as — look, you can’t have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, “It’s not worth it,” or, “You’re losing.” I mean, what does that do for morale? I’m the commander in chief of the military as well, obviously, as, you know, somebody who speaks to the country. And if you look at my remarks, they were balanced. They weren’t Pollyannaish.

And Carter’s response:

It’s disappointing to hear now, two years after the fact, that the president was knowingly bull—-ing us the whole time. And that he justified such dishonesty in the name of supporting the troops and protecting their morale. That’s an insult to America’s men and women in uniform (and their families), who deserve to be told the truth by their political leaders about what’s going on. It’s also an insult to us, as voters, who deserve the truth so we can make the right decisions in the voting booth.

Bush says (and Raddatz seems to agree) that Bush was being honest about the fact that there were some disheartening things going on in Iraq in the summer of 2006. He acknowledged that there was an unacceptable level of extremist violence and murder, that the fighting was tough, but he also stayed focused — we will win this; we are winning this. Raddatz asserts, then, that the only thing that the American people heard was, “We are winning”^[a]. Carter’s response seems to be based on the (incorrect) assumption that “We are winning” is all that Bush said. It isn’t.

Bush was acknowledging the bad while highlighting the positive. He admitted that things weren’t looking good at the moment without giving into defeatism and pessimism. As much as I hate comparing something relatively frivolous like sports to a war, this is the same thing that any good coach would do when his team was hitting a rough patch, but still clinging to a narrow lead. Admit that things are looking grim, that things have not been going as well as he’d like recently, but stay focused on the fact that all is not lost — winning is not out of the question^[b].

Bush is far from blameless in the handling of the War on Terror in general and the Iraqi theater specifically, but blaming him for trying to keep morale up when bad news was coming in (especially when he acknowledged the bad news, even if he downplayed it more than some people may have liked) is a bit underhanded, in my opinion.

( þ Q and O )

1. I’d be interested to know if the reason that’s the American people heard only “we are winning” was because that’s what the mainstream media and the Democrats repeatedly told us he said, without mentioning anything else. [↩]
2. and, in Iraq, even with the increase in deaths during the summer months of ’06, I don’t believe there was any real concern that we couldn’t win; remember that most of the reason these extremists that are fighting against us have any success at all is because we have to hold back because we (unlike our enemies) are concerned about the Iraqi civilians. If I must go with a sports analogy, I’d say this was not a team that was losing, but a team that had had an almost unbelievable lead, and lost a chunk of it. [↩]