Bush’s war: From the outset of the Bush team’s “marketing campaign” (their words) promoting the war in Iraq in 2002, cynical types such as yours truly have suspected that going to war in Iraq on the timetable they rammed through the Congress and the Pentagon had everything to do with electing Republicans – including themselves in 2004 – and nothing whatsoever to do with WMD, democracy in the Middle East, fighting terrorism “over there” and the dozens of other reasons they have tested on us for sending American youths to die in Iraq.

Now – at long last, and way too late – the former Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate confirms this suspicion:

Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, remembers the exchange vividly.

The time was September 2002. The place was the White House, at a meeting in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed congressional leaders for a quick vote on a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

But Daschle, who as Senate majority leader controlled the chamber’s schedule, recalled recently that he asked Bush to delay the vote until after the impending midterm election.

“I asked directly if we could delay this so we could depoliticize it. I said: ‘Mr. President, I know this is urgent, but why the rush? Why do we have to do this now?’ He looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: ‘We just have to do this now.’”

Daschle’s account, which White House officials said they could not confirm or deny, highlights a crucial factor that has drawn little attention amid rising controversy over the congressional vote that authorized the war in Iraq. The recent partisan dispute has focused almost entirely on the intelligence information legislators had as they cast their votes. But the debate may have been shaped as much by when Congress voted as by what it knew.

It was obvious in 2002, and it is crystal clear now, that the Bush team – led by their political director, Karl Rove – carefully scheduled the war so that the timetable would work with the schedule of the next two election cycles.

The vote in Congress to give the president war authority had to occur before the mid-term elections in November 2002 in order to put the Democrats in disarray and to get all the Democratic senators who were planning to run for president in 2004 on the record. That part worked beautifully. Sen. John Kerry, the eventual Democratic nominee, never fully recovered from the GOP ads in which he stated conflicting views on the war.

The war itself was supposed to be a cakewalk. I believe Bush, Cheney and Rove were looking at intelligence that backed up weapons inspectors, including Scott Ritter, who said that Iraq was virtually free of weapons. Saddam was complicit in this because his personal safety from his enemies inside Iraq depended on the myth that he had the weapons.

The Bush political team’s plan was to have the war successfully ended and a new democratically elected government installed by mid-2004 so that Bush could skate to re-election in November – not just as a “war president,” as he referred to himself, but also as a war hero.

Emblematic of this plan was the massive and costly publicity stunt in which Bush landed on the U.S.S. Lincoln off the coast of California and gave a speech with the “Mission Accomplished” banner in the background. The “Mission Accomplished” footage of Bush on the Lincoln was intended to be used in ads for the 2004 elections. That never happened, of course. The war quickly got out of their control and the violence has steadily escalated ever since.

Back in 2002, a lot of foks predicted that the most probable outcome of going into Iraq would be that security on the ground there would spiral out of control. In fact, it was this probability that Bush’s father has cited as the reason he didn’t march into Baghdad after he won the battle for Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

We know now that Bush & Co. received, and ignored, this sort of advice – even when it came from the senior Bush and his advisors. In fact, Bush Jr. probably smiled the same impish half-smile he gave Daschle as he dismissed the warnings of the old graybeards. They just didn’t get it – or, more likely, what they were too shocked to believe – was that the march to war in Iraq war was primarily about domestic politics – about Republicans winning elections at any cost.

Recent polls appear to show that the public is becoming increasingly aware that mistakes were made by the Bush Administration in the run-up to war. The Bush political team’s reaction to this has been to muddy the water by suggesting that they made mistakes based on faulty data, not out of malfeasance. The underlying sentiment from the White House is, “Yes, we screwed up, but it wasn’t our fault.”

Wars do not run like clockwork – neat, tidy and right on schedule. It can’t be done. The president’s attempt to rig the timetable for the Iraq war to the domestic election cycles was beyond foolish, and beyond immoral.

“Yes, we screwed up and now our soldiers are dead and dismembered – but, hey, at least we didn’t lie!!”

Can you imagine a Democratic president making such an assertion? Imagine the howling that would cause, and the drubbing the president would take. The media, the rightwing and even members of the Democratic Party would skewer him (or her). Members of Congress would consider whether official negligence and dereliction of duty at this magnitude constituted impeachable offenses.

The rules for Republicans are just different, I guess.