More from David Warsh on the real causes of the Iraq war:
In basing the public case for its war in Iraq on what it described as an escalating threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration was following an old precept - to be persuasive, make your case as narrow as possible.
The real logic of the war always had to do with cleaning up the aftermath of OPEC and switching the economies of the Middle-East to a different developmental path.
…Deposing Saddam Hussein’s government should be viewed as the taking-down of a dictator of America’s making - rather like the capture and jailing Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1990. Quite apart from benefits that the Bush Administration hopes will be conferred on civil society in Iraq, the pay-off already has been better Israeli-Palestinian relations. The next task is to jump-start some Palestinian growth - and to that end Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas was in Washington meeting with President Bush last week.
This, from a (more-or-less) conservative commentator who complains that “Democratic critics don’t get the point.” However, if the liberal critics don’t get the point, neither do the conservative and neo-liberal defenders.
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