They’re all still lying about Iraq: The real story about the biggest blunder in American history —
Last edited Sun May 24, 2015, 09:53 PM - Edit history (1)
and the right wing’s obsessive need to cover it up
Conservatives are trapped in an outdated and delusional worldview. Rubio, Jeb and media sycophants make it worse
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/24/theyre_all_still_lying_about_iraq_the_real_story_about_the_biggest_blunder_in_american_history_and_the_right_wings_obsessive_need_to_cover_it_up/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
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Republicans’ verbal gyrations over the Iraq War should not be dismissed as the usual rhetorical jabberwocky of an election season. Their stumblings and justifications provide an important window into a larger, crucial story. They reveal that Movement Conservatives remain rooted in a worldview that has been outdated for so long it is now delusional.
But Bush’s first answer was not an error. It revealed his continuing loyalty to a series of principles to which he actually put his name in 1997. With those principles, a group of elite white men set out to revive the Cold War world that had given men like them control of the rest of humanity. Those principles dictated the Iraq War, and — although they are completely obsolete — they still animate Movement Conservatives.
The road to Iraq began in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event marked the end of the Cold War, which had shaped an American generation. Until World War II, America had been just one of many nations jockeying for advantage in a multilateral world. Alliances had been made and broken, wars had been won and lost, and American leaders had shifted the nation’s weight to reflect current conditions around the world. World War II changed all that. America and the USSR emerged from that cataclysm as the world’s superpowers, locked into a Manichean battle for supremacy. For the next 44 years, fervent anti-communist warriors refused to recognize nuance or compromise in foreign affairs. They divided the world into white and black, good and bad, us and them.
When the USSR began to spin apart in 1989, the unraveling of the Cold War left these Movement Conservatives adrift. While many of them found their purpose by turning their attention to wiping the “communism” of social welfare legislation out of domestic life as it had been wiped out of the world community, others looked at the splintering of foreign affairs and despaired. No longer was America a superpower; it was again just one nation among many, unable to dictate the behavior of weaker nations.
The return to a multilateral world entailed a return to an awareness of complexity, in contrast to the simplistic divisions of the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush responded to this complexity by refusing to gloat as smaller nations left the USSR, then ended the Gulf War as soon as Iraqi forces had withdrawn from Kuwait, rather than pushing forward and taking control of Iraq itself. If President Bush’s prudence worried Movement Conservatives, they were horrified by what seemed to them the weakness and confusion of the Clinton years. America seemed impotent as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Haiti shattered
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Very good read
= new reply since forum marked as read
About to start the first draft of what promises to be a long article on them famous emails.
It is not a scandal, perse, unless you consider PNAC and Mercs a scandal, which most Americans do not. It tells me far more about the continuity of foreign policy from one administration to the other, and the failure of the Global War On Terror than most of my fellow DU'ers will like to even consider.
And that was a long two days of notes, time line creation and the rest of the crap needed for complicated stories.
