Thursday, June 26, 2008
Pop quiz: Who, after 9/11 said, "Every nation has to be either for us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price."
That's right. Hillary Clinton.
Arthur Herman, writing at Commentary, has one of those must-read articles that would, in a more perfect world, wake people from their short-term memory loss and refute the historical revisionism that took, remarkably, only a matter of months to develop. To paraphrase Alan Bloom, paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes, "If the answer to 2 plus 2 were to become a political question, rest assured a faction would emerge to take the opposite view. The Iraq War became a political question the moment it was launched, and a faction emerged in the face of its very own record to oppose it. A welcome revision of the revision: Why Iraq Was Inevitable
...In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.
Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.
It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate...
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