True, a handful of Republicans have heartburn over Bush's intentions in Iraq--but only a handful. The list grows thin after Nebraska's Chuck Hagel in the Senate, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. The placement of the Times story, though, suggests a mass repudiation is taking place. It's not--far from it.
That's the distortion part of the story. The inaccurate part involves former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom the Times names as a critic of military action against Iraq. Not so. He's an ally of Bush. Kissinger laid out much of the case for invading Iraq to achieve regime change in an August 11 op-ed in the Washington Post. He explicitly endorsed Bush's policy of preemption: removing a threat before it strikes. The inviolability of the nation-state is no longer the rule, he wrote: "The terrorist threat transcends the nation-state; it derives in large part from transnational groups that, if they acquire weapons of mass destruction, could inflict catastrophic, even irretrievable, damage."
That's not all Kissinger wrote. He insisted "the case for removing Iraq's capacity for mass destruction is extremely strong." He said containment and deterrence worked against the Soviet Union but "are unlikely to work against Iraq's capacity to cooperate with terrorist groups." And he said wiping out Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "would have potentially beneficent political consequences." He concluded: "The imminence of proliferation of WMDs, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system and the demonstrated hostility of Hussein combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action." Kissinger's only qualm was how Bush sells his strategy to allies.