Josh Marshall: Agreeing Iraq Was a Threat != Supporting Invasion
Joshua Micah Marshall does a good job getting to the heart of the dishonesty at the heart of one particular angle the Bush people have been pushing lately: Some of the White House jabs…
For better or worse there was a vast consensus within the American political establishment that Saddam Hussein was a threat to American interests and that he must at least be maintaining some stocks of chemical weapons. It is even true that in 1998 the Congress passed and the president signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which put the US on record as supporting ‘regime change’ in Iraq, though we should not forget that this law was intentionally foisted on the president at a moment of maximum political weakness by most of the same connivers that brought us the real war four years later.
All true. But not everyone thought we should invade Iraq. And that’s the heart of this. You could easily substitute “WMDs” for “a threat” in the sentences above. The question is ‘how much of a threat’? Do we need to invade? Do we need to invade right now? Do we have to invade right now before we even get a chance to see if the suspicions which are the premise of our invasion are even accurate?
Various people of different political stripes said ‘no’ to one or more of these questions. And that’s the heart of the matter. It’s almost comical when you take a moment to think about it. President Bush has spent most of his presidency swinging around the cudgel that he has the character and the strength to defend the country when his political opponents don’t. Now suddenly we learn that all the Democrats he’s run against for four years as not tough enough to defend the country actually supported all of these decisions and would have done everything the same way had they been in power. What an extraordinary development.
