Looking back at old political discussions ...
Posted: July 3rd, 2005, 4:24 am
I've just taken a look back at old debates around the presidential election last year. It's amazing how long ago that all seems now. Anyway, looking back at the arguments from a different perspective, I've made a little observation worthy of some discussion.
In 2002 and early 2003 when the Bush administration was pushing the Iraq war and convincing the country that Saddam Hussein had nukes, the wmd's were the center of the argument, even though Bush's real reasons for the war were to transform a brutal dictatorship in the center of the Middle East into a new democracy that could serve as a model for the whole world. There's no reasonable evidence to say that Bush had any doubt about the nukes himself at the time, but it seems that Bush had gotten the country to expect we'd find nukes, and when we didn't find them, a great number of people decided that the war could not be just because Bush rushed to war with false information against a nation that was, in hindsight, not an imminent threat. Bush would probably be doing a lot better with public opinion right now if he'd have stuck to the ideolistic reasons for the war, but then again, it might not have passed through Congress. In short, the way in which the Bush administration advertised the Iraq war has closed many Americans' minds to the positive effects that the war will have on Iraq and the whole world for years to come.