Dupes and Snipe Hunts
By now, I think we’re all up to speed on those Weapons of Mass Destruction that were supposedly in Iraq. They weren’t, but that’s totally irrelevant at the moment. Everybody’s off topic.
Nope, there were no WMDs in Iraq. Whether you thought there were or not gives some superior moral ground (I didn’t think they were there either), such posturing gains little else. The hard truth is the damage is done. For good or ill, we have re-shaped the future.
Hoping for an apology from the Bush Administration is a waste of time and energy. I have no great love for our current president, but he didn’t seat the orchestra for this Iraqi symphony. The music was written by quite a few composers over the last several administrations.
As much as I’d like to hear one, I don’t really think Bush is going to apologize for allowing his neoconservative administration to dupe him. To do that, he’d have to put Cheney and Rumsfeld out of the fold, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Yes, he was duped – taken on a neocon snipe hunt, just like everybody else. It bothers me a great deal, frankly, that Bush still appears to be reading from the original script, but knowing that changes nothing.
We cannot “uninvade” Iraq.
There are new players and new problems; neither a fast exit plan nor an “I’m sorry” will change the new realities. There’s one heck of a mess, and we “own” a fair chunk of it. So now what? If walking away isn’t an option (and it’s not), muddling through on the current “non-plan” isn’t either.
Right or wrong, left or right – we need to completely re-approach the drawing board - but this time let’s have some transparency.
Time does not flow backward, but that’s the direction history will look when it judges us.
Update: If ever one wondered whether the neocons were driving the Iraq decisions, this quote from WaPo's article Wrestling With History might help clarify [emphasis below is mine]:
But Kristol remains unpersuaded. "I don't think he ever really had his heart in it," he says. And this is interesting, because one of the main reasons why antiwar critics have included Rumsfeld among the fervent forces behind the war is that he signed a letter in 1998 calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein -- a letter written by Kristol. "He had nothing to do with making it happen," Kristol says of Rumsfeld. "We just faxed it to him, as one of the usual suspects, and a few days later they faxed back his signature."
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