Closing the Book on McClellan - The Editors



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May 30, 2008 4:00 A.M.

Closing the Book on McClellan

For the White House, there has to be some consolation in the fact that Scott McClellan is as unpersuasive a spokesman for the views in his new book as he was for the Bush administration.

In the preface of What Happened, he says a very wise editor told him “the hardest challenge for me would be to keep questioning my own beliefs and perceptions throughout the writing process.” McClellan apparently did just that, questioning himself right into becoming a standard-issue critic of the Bush administration. He says the administration waged a “propaganda” campaign prior to the Iraq war, including the “intentional ignoring” of intelligence that undermined its case — catnip for all those eager to trumpet the news that even a former White House press secretary believes Bush manipulated the nation into war.

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McClellan tries to walk a fine line between echoing Bush haters and saying utterly irresponsible things. So he specifically stipulates that the administration didn’t lie. But he couches a commonplace point — that nuances were lost in the heat of the debate over Iraq in the run-up to the war — in indefensibly incendiary language. We won’t rehearse the tired debate over the intelligence over Iraq, except to note that the Silberman-Robb commission studied the matter and concluded the fundamental problem was the poor quality of what intelligence we had to begin with.

McClellan makes much of the administration’s emphasis on weapons of mass destruction prior to the war, as opposed to Bush’s desire to transform the Middle East, which wouldn’t have been as palatable to the public. This is an odd sort of supposedly damning charge: that Bush was secretly more idealistic than he let on in public. But the two rationales for the war weren’t mutually exclusive, and Bush talked about the importance of a democratic transformation in the Middle East as well as the dangers of Saddam, even if the emphasis was (appropriately) on the latter.

The most extraordinary aspect of McClellan’s book is the sense that he stumbled into a reckless, propagandizing administration and did its bidding for years without realizing how nefarious it was — until he left and decided to write a book. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he has shaped his views to the marketing pressures of the publishing industry. If so, it is a shameful end to an undistinguished public career.