Posted on 06/27/2008 5:55:07 PM PDT by tentmaker
In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.
Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
I’ve said this all along. Bush would have been castigated by his current detractors had he not gone into Iraq. Kind of a no win situation for him.
Operation Iraqi Freedom got under way on March 21, 2003. In October of that year, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) reported it was unable to find any of the WMD stockpiles that everyone believed were in Iraq. Still, what the group did find, in the words of its director David Kay, was “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment” that Saddam had concealed from Blix’s inspectors in 2002: proof, in other words, of Saddam’s clear material breach of Resolution 1441.
Of course, this was not the element of the ISG report that attracted the attention of the war’s critics. According to the New York Times, the ISG’s findings supported the view that Bush had “used dubious intelligence to justify his decision to go to war.” That was and is false.
While Kay and his ISG inspectors found no WMD’s, they did not say there had been none. To the contrary: “My view,” Kay stated, is that “Iraq indeed had WMD’s” and that smaller stocks still existed on Iraqi territory. Later he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that he had found evidence of some WMD’s having been moved to Syria before the war. A question mark hangs over that possibility to this day
WE WON THE WOT.
Not that anyone noticed or anything.
OUTSTANDING commentary by Arthur Herman. Thanks very, very much for posting.
We will hear less and less of that as the war concludes in victory, and more and more recollection of the Democrats' participation in events leading up to the invasion now that it's safe to come out from under the bed. What needs to be remembered now that the principal challenge is to cut up the pie of self-congratulation is the true degree to which the Democratic party of the United States was willing to lie, to obscure, to rewrite history, and to sell out the interests of their country for the allure of a morally righteous and politically advantageous posture. With few exceptions this moral rot pervades the party and the foreign policy it will craft promises to be venal, short-sighted, self-interested and thoroughly destructive. All that they learned out of it was which lies to tell.
To paraphrase Lenin, "When I hear 'UN Resolution', I reach for my revolver".
Any US President who acts, or does not act, based on a phony "resolution" from the Turtle Bay Parliament of whores is a traitor, in my view.
maybe
but it will never make its way onto tv.
countless millions of tv-morons hate bush.
Very good.
+1, for later
This is a brilliantly written analysis of the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003.
Brilliantly written it may be - certainly the title was promising - but it is I am afraid irrelevant. If I find it impossible to read, what are the chances that an undecided voter will even have a thought about reading it?I can't read it because of cognitive dissonance - I know that Bush/Rove lost the PR battle decisively because they did not even seriously engage it. They allowed the superficial "press" of journalism to reshape every issue with a second guess. Karl Rove has figured it out now, he says - but it was too late for that a long time ago. They should have gone into the White House knowing it, not figured it out after Rove retired late in a second term.
Phooey!
If there is or was evidence, then why would there still be a question mark? Unless...............it's Mr. Kay's credibility that is in question.
I don't find it irrelevant at all, but then I don't care too much about the politics of it anymore. At the time, I had HUGE arguments with family and friends about this issue and lost a few friends over it, accusing them of being un-ethical by advocating peace. There are still some large unknowns in the process, but it's being sorted out - which this article proves and I still hope that history will get it right and the peace of the middle east will end up drastically improved because George Bush had the nerve to do the right thing.
George Bush had the nerve to do the right thing.
Sure - but in the process, he inoculated all the other "Saddams" in the world against the possibility of American intervention.Because the conventional wisdom is that Bush was a cowboy - so that in future (as the British say), nobody can follow his example even if it's the only sane thing to do in a given case.
Not if history gets it right in spite of way the treacherous media has treated the issue. If this article defines the final judgement of his actions, the exact opposite becomes true. Before Bush, the attitude of the world seemed to be that the US might fire a few cruise missiles at you or even do some bombing, but once that was over, they were afraid to put boots on the ground and had been ever since Vietnam. That is no longer true. It may take more than a few years for the majority opinion to embrace the point of view of this article, but if the stability and peace of the middle east are increased by the example of Iraq, I think it's just a matter of time until this happens.
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