Crossposted at dKos and My Left Wing
So Dan Senor was a guest via satellite on Real Time with Bill Maher this weekend. In case you don’t know who Dan Senor is, he was the Senior Advisor to Presidential Envoy L. Paul Bremer III, Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. You can find his official White House bio here. He is currently a contributor to Fox News.
Now lets examine some of the interesting things Mr. Senor had to say to Bill and his audience…
SENOR: Another night of a very diverse crowd in the audience.
MAHER: Okay, say he won Florida , and after 9/11 – and maybe there wouldn’t have been a 9/11 – well, Gore was a reader. [laughter] [applause] [cheers] Stop. Assuming 9/11 happened, but Gore chose not to invade Iraq , how would the War on Terror now be worse?
SENOR: Well, I think we would have focused – I think, a Gore administration–
MAHER: Focused, exactly. [laughter]
SENOR: –would have gone after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and gone after the Taliban. And that would have been very good. The problem is, it’s not enough. For three decades, we’ve ignored the entire Middle East . Basically, our policy was, ignore these dictators; let them do whatever they want in their own backyards; let them treat their citizens anyway they want, as long as they gave us gas for cheap.
And I think now what we’re doing is trying to change that dynamic and put these regimes on notice that they are going to be held accountable by their own citizens and give their citizens an outlet for the lives they lead. And hopefully, that could stop these incubators of terrorists, for terrorism, being created. And I don’t think a Gore administration – it’s hard to talk hypothetically here – I don’t think a Gore administration would have gone the extra step to pro-actively turn the region upside down, hopefully for the better.
MAHER: Right, and–
SENOR: I think they would have stopped – I think they would have stopped at Afghanistan , and I don’t think that’s enough.
MAHER: Yeah. And you know what? In ten, 20, 50 years, you may be right. I mean, it is – what I admire about what you guys did in Iraq was that, unlike so many political solutions, it was a long-range way to look at the problem.
SENOR: Absolutely. And you know what?
MAHER: [overlapping] But you seem to have messed it up.
SENOR: [overlapping] People who criticize it – people who criticize it – I’m open to criticizing the policy, but they’ve got to articulate what their policy is. I mean, it’s not enough to say the Bush policy of trying to build democracy in the heart of the Middle East is not going to work; it’s a bad policy. What’s their counter-proposal? Is it to continue to ignore these dictators? Continue to ignore the human rights violations–
Now if you examine this statement closely, Mr. Senor seems to have dropped all of the Bush Administration pretense and is readily admitting that our purpose in going into Iraq was to “pro-actively turn the region upside down”. Now we’ve heard the “building a democracy in the Middle East” reasoning before, but it has always been used as an afterthought in justifying the war and maintaining support. The difference now is that Mr. Senor seems to be asserting that this was our policy from the outset.
No WMD.
No “Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program”.
No “Saddam had senior-level contacts with al-Qaeda”.
Now, Mr. Senor was the Senior White House advisor to Paul Bremer. This guy was definitely in the know on Administration strategy and policy. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see him explain these statements under oath!
You can view the full transcript for Real Time Episode #317 here.