Remembrance

Shah from Global American Discourse has provided yours truly with a link to a recent article, published in the Washington Post and on the Carnegie Endowment website. It is a good article and well worth the read, but here are a couple of excerpts:

On Iraq, Short Memories

By Robert Kagan

The Washington Post, September 12, 2005

If you read even respectable journals these days, including this one, you would think that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq. A recent piece in The Post's Style section suggested that the war was an "idea" that President Bush "dusted off" five years after Bill Kristol and I came up with it in the Weekly Standard.

That's not the way I recall it. I recall support for removing Saddam Hussein by force being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives. We all had the same information, and we got it from the same sources. I certainly had never based my judgment on American intelligence, faulty or otherwise, much less on the intelligence produced by the Bush administration before the war. I don't think anyone else did either. I had formed my impressions during the 1990s entirely on the basis of what I regarded as two fairly reliable sources: the U.N. weapons inspectors, led first by Rolf Ekeus and then by Richard Butler; and senior Clinton administration officials, especially President Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen and Al Gore.

What part of this is so hard for the left to comprehend?

Just for argument's sake, let's say that this whole thing is wrong. Let's say that George Bush did take us to war under false pretenses. Each and every one of these people and a whole host of others as well, had the opportunity to make this argument, back then. Why did they not do it, then?

It's interesting to watch people rewrite history, even their own. My father recently recalled for me a line from Thucydides, which Pericles delivered to the Athenians in the difficult second year of the three-decade war with Sparta. "I am the same man and do not alter, it is you who change, since in fact you took my advice while unhurt, and waited for misfortune to repent of it."

One word, politics.