Partisanship - the new game from Milton-Bradley...,
2003-06-22 04:57:14
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Be Objectively Pro-Soviet - Elect Bush/Cheney in 2004...,
2003-06-25 14:57:50
the smoking pants:
US forces may, possibly, potentially, just might have, found Stacks of Paper of Mass Destruction. I'll be sleeping easier now, I can tell you.
Bush has been arguing that weapon sites may have been looted "in the final days of the regime", thus conceding the anti-war position that, if anything, were there actual weapons of some destruction in Iraq an invasion would increase the likelihood of them landing in the hands of non-state actors. It's nice to see that, after the fact anyway, he's on our side of the issue.
What I would like to see is a full release of captured documents to public agencies, given that they could possibly, potentially, just might, almost certainly would further expose the support Western governments gave Saddam for WMD and WSD programs before 1991, something you'd almost swear simply wasn't part of the historical record, reading about all this "potential evidence" they might be finding.
Also related, per the Hersch piece on the Pentagon unit (which was also handling Chalabi, who commonly gets suggested as the forger of different pro-invasion documents) that provided the trumped up propaganda for the war is its sister office in Ariel Sharon's government. There's some amount of prattle over Strauss and "Straussians" relating to this, little of which is very serious.
As Joe Cropsey says in the Hersch piece, "people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious—‘If I tell you the truth I can’t but help the enemy.’", which isn't an idea unique to Strauss, and furthermore the deception only succeeded in fooling Americans, not our enemies or our allies, as they all knew perfectly well that Iraq wasn't a threat, weren't decieved by the Pentagon's propaganda wing, and the war gave our enemies (you know, the terrorists) exactly what they wanted in confirming their ideological beliefs about America: meaning the deciet could only be either really stupid or a ploy for the destabalization of the global order and all the risks and benefits that entails - not national security - making it an ignoble lie that gave evidence to the inferiorities of Western civillization, which, if you ask me, is really just downright anti-Straussian.
The point, in the end, being that there were alternatives for undermining Saddam's tyranny per the laudible goal of "spreading" democracy - as though it were a jam substitute you could spread with a knife - without resorting to tyranny ourselves.
One last comment: there's a dangerously prevalent assumption - one I certainly subscribed to - that Iraqi Shi'ites would want to form a fundementalist theocratic regime in Iraq: this remains nearly ubiquitous across the entire spectrum of debate (the Nation article linked to earlier in this post repeats it). All the evidence I've seen thus far indicates that this is a fallacy and at its core a fundemental misunderstanding of Iraqi political-religious beliefs, as polling suggests that only a quarter of Iraqis want a religious state, even if the entire basis of this support came from Shi'ites (which strikes me as unlikely) it would still be a political minority within that faction. Much of what is coming out of official statements from various Shi'ite factions (the ones in Iraq, more so than the exile groups) has been, to me at least, moderate and well considered.
