Tuesday, July 22, 2003

A long article at USS Clueless has some good analysis about the road to war in Iraq, although it’s got a fair amount of cant in there as well. What’s fascinating is a newish bit of truth-telling from the right: We always knew that weapons of mass destruction was a trumped up reason to go to war.   Some of us have been saying this for a while – that even if the war was worth fighting in order to remake a troubled and threatening region, the justifications offered for doing so have been iffy at best. Bush said in broad terms that we were going to address “evil” regimes, and he’s obviously been serious about taking action against at least one of them (and thus pressuring the others), but there was a big disconnect in establishing the proximate causes of launching a preemptive war.   Steven Den Beste argues that we had to lie because WMD was the only debate the UN would consider, and the Brits needed us to go to the UN before they could join us. He’s conceding an important point here, that Bush lied to the country about the reasons for going to war, but he’s saying that the lie was told with a wink and so it’s ok.   He may be right about Bush’s reasons for lying about so-called WMD (a term Rafe Colburn long ago exposed as a sham itself), but as more people grasp the extent of the falsehoods I think the political damage to Bush will be serious. And if evidence emerges that the Saddam-Osama link was trumped up, well, what was the reason for telling that lie?   I still think W will win next November, because the scary shit that kicked in on 9/11 is still out there and people will see him as a wartime president in a war that started on that day, not on the day we invaded Iraq. The death today of Saddam’s sons will help him, and may help the cause of pacifying Iraq, which is a vital American interest whether you opposed the war or not.   But his margin for error on the economy or a protracted bloodletting in Iraq has been reduced, and he’s not looking quite as invulnerable as he once did. 6:23:35 PM    comment []

Eric Muller saw some “subversive” road signs in western NC. 5:52:10 PM    comment []