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Neocons are caught misrepresenting their pre-war positions
In the previous entry, I suggested three possible explanations for John Hinderaker’s amazing statement at Powerline that “The main purpose of the Iraq war was to begin bringing freedom and democracy to the Arab world.” The third explanation was that Hinderaker had simply forgotten about the centrality of WMDs in the prewar debate because of all the water that’s gone under the bridge since then. Innocent that I am, there was an obvious fourth possibility that had not occurred to me: Is Hinderaker now claiming that the war was always primarily about democratization in order to cover up his pre-war position that the war was about WMDs? That thought is triggered by Glenn Greenwald’s devastating piece, “Selective Amnesia,” in the current issue of The American Conservative (not online yet), in which Greenwald exposes various neocons’ false characterizations of their pre-war positions. Thus, after quoting numerous statements by Charles Krauthammer in 2002 and 2003 urging in the strongest terms that we had to invade Iraq in order to stop the further development of WMDs, Greenwald writes:
Now, as the war he demanded lies in ruins, Krauthammer uses his Post column to revise his record: “Our objectives in Iraq were two-fold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government.” His hysterical obsession with WMDs has been whitewashed from his pundit history, and in its place is a goal that Krauthammer barely mentioned prior to the war.Michael Ledeen’s cover-up, also discussed by Greenwald, is worse than Krauthammer’s, because Ledeen has not merely reformulated his position while ignoring his previous position, as Krauthammer has done; rather, Ledeen has positively denied that he said prior to the war what in fact he repeatedly said. A couple of months ago Ledeen wrote at NRO that he had “opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.” At the time, I pointed out the absence of any evidence to support this astonishing statement. I also took apart the one piece of evidence that Ledeen provided the next day at NRO to support his statement. But Greenwald has gone further, finding numerous articles by Ledeen before the war in which Ledeen passionately urged the invasion of Iraq. Thus Ledeen’s statement that he “opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place” is a blatant falsehood.
I will have more to say on this later. For the moment, let me leave you with this question. What would Krauthammer and other neocons have to gain by covering up their prior, WMD-based argument for the war and replacing it by a democracy argument for the war, given the fact that the democracy argument has been even more discredited than the WMD argument? Email entry |