Nadine,
Iraq wasn't an uphill sell. One reason why at least some and perhaps many Democrats caved was that they knew he had the votes. The fact that the Senate was nominally Democratic was irrelevant: Zell Miller was going to vote with him; Mary Landrieu would have lost had she not voted with him; Max Cleland got clobbered on the issue even though it made about as much sense as saying that William Henry Harrison was a common man who was born in a log cabin.
It was brilliant domestic politics. Brilliantly timed and executed. Even if the Senate hadn't voted with him, he would have made the same stump speech, only changing emphasis a little. To say that 9/11 was the "main rallying factor" is true, yes, but to point that is part of the case that the Republicans were being duplicitous: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, but they were slyly shading that truth, using the power of associative thinking that they and Madison are true experts at to make the connection between them. They were so effective that a majority of Americans still believe that Saddam had at least something to do with 9/11 even after Bush has said (sort of "whispered" it--it has served its purpose) publicly (finally) that he didn't.
There was no war fever, no demand.
I partly agree with this--there was no demand until the Bush admin created it that fall. But it wasn't that much of an uphill sell in this country, it was a very steep uphill sell in the rest of the world, because most of them don't share the same perception of the US as the Great Liberator of the World, as a number of American citizens do.
with elections only two years apart you can accuse any President of conducting any foreign policy for the sake of the next election.
Not like that, not pushing a major war like that. Of course it wasn't major like WWII. But it wasn't Grenada either. And that is especially true of the Aftermath. I can't believe you think that people in Bush admin actually thought long and hard about what to do after they defeated the Iraq army. You should listen to the Peter Galbraith talk that I linked yesterday and the day before. Galbraith is no wild eyed lightweight guy. It will take about 45-50 minutes or so, less if you don't listen to the Q&A (although the last question was something like, what would you have done? his answer wasn't as good as the talk generally was, but those questions aren't easy to answer in time constrained contexts, and any real answer has to take into account how various external relationships could have been different if a different administration had been in power the previous two years). |
