Selective Memory, part 2

Here's a response from an agitated blogger: plemeljr said...

Look, the President's conflation of September 11th and Iraq is "driving us batty" because it is clearly a lie and a deception aimed at the American people. Regardless of what Andrew McCarthy says, Iraq is not linked to September 11th - just ask US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Or perhaps every single report concerning September 11th - including September 11th Commission Final Report. Islamofascist terrorist groups very well might be operating in the Iraq theatre, but it is only because the President's foolhardy invasion of Iraq.

You can find more of this rant on their website. It's cynical and jaded and simplistic. It assumes the worst and has no new ideas. But you're welcome to read it.

Here was my response (with a few edits):

Well I looked, (try not to get so upset), and I'm not seeing any of the conspiratorial lies of the Vietnam era White House.

Here's the distinction that you may be failing to see. No one, including the president, has been able to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Saddam was not the 20th hijacker.

But, replacing Saddam with a democracy, which everyone agrees was necessary and became official US policy under Clinton (not Bush), IS PART OF THE SOLUTION. And it's a brilliant one.

Police work is not going to prevent future attacks. Being nice is not going to prevent future attacks. Fundamentally changing the culture which breeds and sustains this ideology will do the job.

Why Afghanistan? Because we had to. But the 'stan is not likely to infect its neighbors with democracy.

Why Iraq and not Syria or Iran or someone else? Because Iraq is far and away the best candidate:

• A large, educated, secular, middle class is rare in the middle east.
• Also, Iraq is uniquely a conflation (I had to look that word up) of different ethnic/religious groups and that's a good thing.
• We were already in position (since '91) to finish Iraq off (remember otherwise we'd still be there today getting shot at in the no-fly-zones).
• Unseating Saddam undermines the other Baathist regimes in the area (like Syria, which just pulled out of Lebanon--it's working!).

Here's another way of looking at it. If communist agents had conducted 9/11 (let's say from Cambodia). We'd probably have invaded North Korea instead of Iraq. Not following me? The president's approach is to attack the disease, not the symptom. To undo communist aggression, we would need to free people from the grips of communism. North Korea would be the logical first step, since we have been sitting on its border for 50 years. We would then create pressure on China by establishing a democracy on its border, affecting the young reformers in that country (this is what we're doing to Iran). Some countries you invade, others you let fall to internal pressures. [This analogy is not perfect but there are some striking similarities.]

Also consider the filter that most of us see things through. The Watergate distrust of (Republican) government officials, the assumption that they have hidden agendas and are telling us bold-faced lies, the assumption from Vietnam that all wars are immoral and always wrong, and our side is always more wrong than the enemy -- affects how most people over 30 view President Bush (those under 30 are still watching MTV or are serving in Iraq already).

Thanks, I eagerly await your reply. God bless,
Jared.

Selective memory is a good title here. Because all that some people want to remember is the WMD issue. I remember thinking at the time that too much emphasis was put on this one reason and not the many others. But that doesn't undo the reality, that many other reasons exist and always have.

The pathological distrust of the President is sad. The stone throwing by people who don't have any proactive solutions at all is sad. I have trouble identifying what they're actually for.

Ronald Reagan said it well, "The trouble with our liberal friends are not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so."