Assrocket
By So saith Assrocket:
In fact, as we have often noted, if you listened to any of the speeches President Bush gave on Iraq in 2003 or read the Congressional authorization on the war, every rationale that has ever been discussed is there. And, as I have often said, bringing reform and democracy to the Arab world was perceived by me, and by many if not most of the war’s early supporters, as the most important goal.
As Rob has pointed out many times (most recently here), the fact that (now disgruntled) supporters of the war imagined they would get a different kind of war than the one they were promised and the one that they got does not excuse their being played for suckers; as a corollary to that, I’d argue that (continually optimistic) supporters of the war can’t be allowed to retroactively assign equal value to any and all of the claims made by the Bush administration during its campaign for war in 2002-2003.
As even an undergraduate political science major could tell us, the Bush administration offered an incoherent array of justifications for war (Devon Largio actually identified 27). But however inspiring they may have been to John Hinderaker, George Bush’s off-hand, rhetorical promises to dismantle the “torture chambers” and “rape rooms” (at, ahem, Abu Ghraib) and convert Iraq into a “model” for other states in the region are, at the end of the day, as meaningless as McKinley’s vow to bring democratic institutions to the Philippines. If he wants to find some good news in that, more power to him.