There’s been much said, even in this space, as regards how the position of the left has shifted as regards our actions in Iraq. I’ve devoted megabytes to the topic here, in the weekly BITs and in Usenet. Sullivan provides another example this morning, in the form of liberal apologist Maureen Dowd….
Here’s Maureen Dowd on March 9 of this year:
The case for war has been incoherent due to overlapping reasons conservatives want to get Saddam. The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America’s primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats. And in 1997, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, and other conservatives, published a “statement of principles,” signed by Jeb Bush and future Bush officials — Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Rejecting 41’s realpolitik and shaping what would become 43’s pre-emption strategy, they exhorted a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity,” with America extending its domain by challenging “regimes hostile to our interests and values.”
And on June 4, only three months later, we discover that
For the first time in history, Americans are searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over… Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam’s poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction.”
So what was it? An incoherent set of multiple reasons or a single, crude one, i.e. self-defense against the “imminent” threat of WMDs? It doesn’t really matter to Dowd, of course. Whatever the Bush administration does, she will criticize it. When it offered many reasons, she lambasted it for incoherence.
…. while in the end, being incoherent herself. The fact is, (and I’m annoyed Sullivan missed this) it is the left that has been incoherent, and has shifted it’s position. The purpose of that shift is clear… to differentiate themselves from Mr Bush so as to regain their far left wing following. They got caught following Mr Bush because his actions were inherently correct.
Which of course would make liberals now, wrong…. not that you’ll get them to admit that now.
But all the signs are there… and the American people see them.
