President, Marking Anniversary of War, Urges World to Unite to Combat Terrorism [New York Times: International News]

Read this article.  The writer notes that Bush's reasons for invading Iraq have changed over the past year.  first it was immient threat and WMD.  Now its Saddam was a nasty man and we needed to bring good ole American-style democracy to Iraq.  In other words, Bush and his cronies keep changing the reasons for the Iraq invasion.  The only thing that has stayed the same is that we did indeed invade Iraq.  So to me that emans that to the Bush Administration invading Iraq was justified no matter what the rationale was.  So people should ask why Iraq and not Iran or North Korea or any dozen other supporters of terrorism?  maybe its the oil, or simply revenge for trying to kill Dubya's daddy, or maybe just unfinished busiess for the neocons who treat terroism as cold war II.  I listened to a radio debate between someone from the Clinton administration and someone from the Heritage Foundation which reinforced this notion. The latter argued that terrorism is caused by failed states and are state sponsored and therefore overthrowing a the Iraq state was a justifable end in itself.  The Clinton guy spoke about terroism as a stateless conern that transcended national borders and emerged from a calsh of cultures and worldviews.  In short, the Republicans and noconcerns take a state-ventric, top down viewpoint, whereas the folks who are against the war or think the current iraq conflict has been handeld incredibly badly and has increased the risk of world terrosim take a bottom up viewpoint.  As a consqeunce they each are speaking at cross-purposes with each other. 

The biggest problem is that the neoconservaitves and evangelicals that make up a large part of Bush's adminsitration and the Republican Part are right-wing fanatics who are so certain of their world view that they believe the ends justifies the means.  It is encoruaging to see the left wake up to the threat from these fanatics and fundamentalist and fight fire with fire.  It's going to be an interesting election....

7:10:19 PM