This has been a fast-changing news cycle over the last week or so (and MFK has been behind a bit catching up…), but it’s amazing how the further and faster we go, the more we’re still in the same place. First, the Iraq war of course: the administration’s new uranium-intelligence scandal is bringing up debates that were thought, if not settled, then at least past. But after all, it’s hard to see this as anything new - wasn’t it an open secret that the administration was being disengenuous in its case for war? As Josh Marshall notes, he had written a piece back then about how WMD wasn’t the real reason for the war and today he revisits the matter with one of the better summations of the issue:
Not only was the WMD issue (and the allied issue of Iraq’s connection to al Qaida) systematically exaggerated, the entire WMD issue — and the nexus to non-state terrorist groups like al Qaida — wasn’t even the main reason for the war itself…. Now some people on the left are saying, well, the real reason was the possession of Iraqi oil. Or, the real reason was to seal the 2002 election or the 2004 election. Various other real reasons have been and are being proffered. But these are at best secondary or tertiary reasons. ….
Now, the series of neoconservative rationales for invading Iraq well predate 9/11…. But over time after 9/11 one overriding theory of the war did take shape: it was to get America irrevocably on the ground in the center of the Middle East (thus fundamentally reordering the strategic balance in the region), bring to a head the country’s simmering conflict with its enemies in the region, and kick off a democratic transformation of the region which would over time dissipate the root causes of anti-American terrorism and violence: autocracy, poverty and fanaticism.
I don’t think we should downplay the secondary and tertiary reasons (How many political candidates in the US promise to bust OPEC’s monopoly without offering a concrete suggestion of how to do it? The Bush administration has done something about it.), but Marshall’s right that the hawks are sincere in their belief that Iraq made sound geopolitical sense. But much like supply-side economics, that ideology doesn’t necessarily sell well with the general public, so must be wrapped in other garb and mispresentation.
On another (unrelated?) note, Michael Tomasky has a great piece this week on the Greens, now that their recent convention made the news sound more like 1999 than 2003. I really like Tomasky’s formation that “most of the people who lectured me on how corrupt Gore was and how Nader was the courageous choice were people for whom the outcome of the election, on a personal level, didn’t really matter. ” This kind of reasoning can lead to ad hominem reasoning, but at its best it captures the way that individual class trajectories get captured in political dispositions in unsuspecting ways. And like Tomasky I’ve generally bristled at the self-righteous tone of the Greens - not only is bad strategy, but like Michael Moore’s speeches, it ends up being more about the speaker than the topic at hand. Let’s hope that the bitter taste of the 2000 election still sits in progressives’ mouth enough to keep them from the Greens and, conversely, that the DLC doesn’t insult all of them away from the voting booth.
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