You're right, the Kristol interview is important reading. It expresses the neocon view of things very clearly. There's a little bit of disingenuousness, though, about one point, the key shift from targeting al Qaeda to targeting Iraq.
Kristol, Woolsey, and the rest of that camp argued very, very strongly from 9/11 on that Iraq was involved in the attacks and/or the anthrax mailings. For them, this was a direct link between the two targets (Osama and Saddam), not an indirect link, or at least that's what they claimed at the time. According to the Woodward book, moreover, Bush himself felt this way.
I think that much-bally-hooed linkage was critical in helping Bush, and perhaps some others, to target Saddam. And yet to this day it has not been supported by a single serious piece of real evidence, and practically nobody believes it any more. So I think it's not impossible that a crucial mental step toward this new war was taken on completely fraudulent grounds, and then retrospectively justified by heroic assumptions about unlikely contingencies. Thus, you no longer hear that Saddam helped perpetrate 9/11, but rather that he might help perpetrate the next one. Big difference, and if the latter point was where people had started, they might not be quite as gung-ho.
Let's just say that if I were one of those people who had been responsible for such intellectual sleight-of-hand, and had been so wrong about so many important things (the role of Iraq in 9/11, the military value of the Iraqi opposition, etc.), I wouldn't feel very good about myself in my heart of hearts.
tb@Icertainlywouldn'tbeacocksureselfrighteousaholeeither.com |
