Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Compare and Contrast
201k, July 19, 2004:
- Look, let's be frank here: it's time for knee-jerk supporters of the Bush administration to start to honest-up a bit, and consider the possibility -- believed here from the start -- that they took the U.S. to war in Iraq not because that country had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Queda but because they knew it did not.
Get it? They went to Iraq not because it was a threat, but because it was the easiest target in the region.
The question all Americans should be asking is why? What were the reasons for invading Iraq that they couldn't tell Americans?
- [Henry] Kissinger has been one of the few trusted outside advisers that W. has listened to on Iraq. The administration has shaped its policy to hew to the 83-year-old Unwise Man's belief that the only way to beat an insurgency is to stick it out, no matter how many American kids and foreign civilians die.
Mr. Kissinger's reasoning for favoring war in Iraq had none of the idealistic gloss about democracy that the president came up with later. Like Mr. Cheney, he thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq not because it was strong, but because it was weak. "We need to humiliate" radical Islam, he told Mr. Gerson, and send the message that "we're not going to live in this world that they want for us."
