They’re all still lying about Iraq: The real story about the biggest blunder in American history — a

[applegrove]

They’re all still lying about Iraq: The real story about the biggest blunder in American history — and the right wing’s obsessive need to cover it up

by Heather Cox Richardson at Salon

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/

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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 They reveal that Movement Conservatives remain rooted in a worldview that has been outdated for so long it is now delusional.



The tempest began in a teapot when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asked Jeb Bush whether he would have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now. Bush said yes, defending the 2003 invasion that more than 70% of Americans now think was a mistake. This answer prompted astonished observers to wonder how he could have fumbled so badly. Within days, Bush stammered first to the suggestion that he had misheard the question, and then concluded that he would, in fact, have opposed the operation altogether.

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.



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[applegrove]

1. I like the last paragraph.

The debacle that became the morass in Iraq has roots in arguments far older than today’s debates over whether or not presidential candidates would have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now. Those debates illustrate a delusional view of foreign affairs based in a perilous worldview. That worldview establishes that a small group of elites can simply dictate reality, no matter how out of touch with the real world they are. It is the last-ditch fight of an aging group of white men who cannot accept that their supremacy was not because of their extraordinary worth but because the vagaries of history aligned, very briefly, to make men like them supreme. Those historical circumstances were unique, and they are long gone.

[Major Hogwash]

2. Jabberwocky is a good word to use to describe the GOP's defense of the Iraq War.

The one that was supposed to pay for itself.
I wonder if on the 13th anniversary of the beginning of that war, just next year, the same douchebags that gave us 40+ reasons for starting that war will come out publicly and announce to the world that they were right all along . . you just wait a little longer now, we'll find those WMDs yet!!!

I was posting on a military-based forum back in 2003 when Operation Shock and Awe began, so I asked the community that was posting on that forum how long they would wait for those WMDs to be found.
On May 1st, 2003, General Conway of the USMC announced "We have been from Basra to Baghdad and no large cache of WMDs had been found."

Yet, within just a few more months, Robert Novak outed Valerie Plame, and so I asked the community on that forum if that wasn't an act of treason.

No WMDs had been found by that time in August of 2003, so I asked my question about WMDs a little different way . . how long would it take before the people on that forum realized that the story that Bush had told, the lie, the complete and utter baseless lie that Hussein had WMDs, was false.
They either ridiculed me for asking that question, or they replied by saying they would give it a little more time.

Some of them are still posting on that forum to this very day . . . and some of them are still waiting for those non-existent WMDs to be found!!!

[Paka]

3. Great Post!