Via the Stakeholder
Friedman channels me. Only I kind of got there a few months ago
I admit, I’m a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion ? as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did ? I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn’t just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.
I guess that makes me a little less slow than Friedman. Feint praise for myself….
AP,
As a long-time, die-hard Bush opponent, I wonder why you and Friedman ever thought that Mr. Bush might do the right thing regarding Iraq. Did the Bush administration handle something properly and I missed it?
From the Patriot Act to Enron to mishandling Afghanistan to abandoning the Kyoto Protocols to hamstringing stem-cell research to tax cuts designed to benefit the hyper-rich, I honestly can’t think any point where the Bush administration made a choice with which I agreed. I suspect that you would have a tough time too.
So why did you support Bush on Iraq?
Was it that the Iraq anti-war types looked too much like the same folks that opposed the war in Afghanistan to take them seriously? Was it a feeling that the statement “No Blood for Oil” was just too simple for our complex world? Did it look like the anti-war types were just the usual dirty, hippy-dippy suspects? Did it seem that the anti-war minority was merely a new name for the rabidly anti-Bush minority?
I am not trying to say “I told you so”. I didn’t — hell, I don’t know if I knew what a “blog” was then. I am trying to figure out if Americans fell behind the Bush war effort because the administration and their supporters did a good job of selling it or if it was, to some degree, because the anti-war movement was in someway repulsive, e.g. “I know Bush is a lying bastard, but those people opposing this war are the same dirty, smelly, anti-American hippie wannabes repeating the same chants that they shout to oppose everything that the United States does. I’d have to be pretty stupid to get behind that.”
Or was it the well-marketed combination of the two, i.e. the pro-war folks simultaneously promoted the war (i.e. “Amurca must be strong” + lies) and the idea that the anti-war types (and their ideas) couldn’t be taken seriously. And if it was a combination, how much of a factor was the repulsive peacenik image?
If you get a chance let me know.
thanks,
“A.M.”
I admit I’m a little slow….
I’ll answer it in a longer post later. I think your questions are very good, but I don’t want to glibbly answer them.