Some reminders of how some people’s memories are short. Here’s Maureen Dowd on March 9 of this year:
The case for war has been incoherent due to overlapping reasons conservatives want to get Saddam. The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America’s primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats. And in 1997, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, and other conservatives, published a “statement of principles,” signed by Jeb Bush and future Bush officials — Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Rejecting 41’s realpolitik and shaping what would become 43’s pre-emption strategy, they exhorted a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity,” with America extending its domain by challenging “regimes hostile to our interests and values.”
And on June 4, only three months later, we discover that
For the first time in history, Americans are searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over… Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam’s poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction.”
So what was it? An incoherent set of multiple reasons or a single, crude one, i.e. self-defense against the “imminent” threat of WMDs? It doesn’t really matter to Dowd, of course. Whatever the Bush administration does, she will criticize it. When it offered many reasons, she lambasted it for incoherence. If it had merely offered one, she’d be making the same inane case today that they weren’t complex enough. They can’t win. And she merrily goes on criticizing whatever it is they will do tomorrow.
“AN EXPANSIVE VISION”: She’s not the only one. Only recently, the New York Times cited the “imminent threat” canard as the sole justification used for war. Here’s another trip down memory lane:
President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a ‘free and peaceful Iraq’ that would serve as a ‘dramatic and inspiring example’ to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time.
Sounds like my retroactive defense of what the White House said and did. But that was, in fact, the New York Times editorial on February 27. How quickly the anti-war brigade changes its tune. Here’s liberal columnist E. J. Dionne in January, making a very similar point:
Bush still has a problem that goes beyond style: We don’t know if this war is primarily about (1) taking weapons of mass destruction out of Saddam Hussein’s hands, or (2) removing Hussein from power, or (3) bringing democracy to Iraq and revolutionizing the politics of the Middle East. Supporters of war argue that all three goals are compatible. In principle, they are. But because the administration has gone back and forth about which of these goals matters most and how they fit together, its policy has been open to easy challenge.
So the administration actually provided a whole welter of reasons to go to war; it didn’t simply focus on one thing – WMDs – although that was always a part of the case. But, again, if all that is true, how can we take today’s one-note criticism seriously? It’s not the administration that should be having a credibility problem these days. It’s their critics.
The Dish 