Selective memory and revisionist history

Glenn Greenwald has a piece, in of all places, The American Conservative where he takes to task the neocon war mongers for their Selective Amnesia. As they try to save their reputations they want you to forget that they are as much responsible for the debacle in Mesopotamia as anyone in the Bush administration. He has chosen Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Peggy Noonan, and Ralph Peters special consideration. My favorite of the bunch is Charles Krauthammer if only because he gets more air time than the rest.

Prior to the invasion, Krauthammer used his various media platforms—his column at the Washington Post and his almost daily appearances on Fox News—to warn that Iraq was rapidly building up its WMD capabilities and that the U.S. risked running out of time if it did not invade immediately. He assured Americans that the war would pay for itself with oil revenues and that Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators.

In an Aug. 26, 2002 Time column, Krauthammer crystallized the issue at the heart of the Iraq discussion: “The growing debate on invading Iraq hinges on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” In his Washington Post column of Oct. 7, Krauthammer argued, “Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists.”

According to Krauthammer, the WMD threat was so imminent that, as he argued on Fox News on Nov. 8, 2002, waiting a matter of months could mean that Saddam obtained nuclear capability: “Under this Resolution, if Blix does not have to report back to the Security Council for 105 days, do the math. That’s the 21st of February. That is a very long time away. And it could be at the end of our window to attack.” In his Nov. 15, Post column, Krauthammer rang the alarm yet again: “We’ve been given time, but so has Hussein. Time to hide his weapons. Time even to distribute them through Iraqi agents—aka diplomats using diplomatic pouches—into the heart of the enemy. (We still don’t know where last year’s anthrax came from.) Time to give the stuff to terrorists who, as Osama bin Laden’s tape suggests, are now prepared to make common cause with Hussein.”

Now, as the war he demanded lies in ruins, Krauthammer uses his Post column to revise his record: “Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government.” His hysterical obsession with WMD has been whitewashed from his pundit history, and in its place is a goal that Krauthammer barely mentioned prior to the war.

As recently as Oct. 28, 2005, he mocked foreign-policy realists for their belief that democracy could not take root in Iraqi culture, insisting that “the overwhelming majority of Iraq’s people have repeatedly given every indication of valuing their newfound freedom.” But now, Krauthammer claims that the war he urged is failing because Iraqis are incapable of understanding what freedom is about:

[T]he problem here is Iraq’s particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Hussein’s totalitarianism. Is this America’s fault? No. It is a result of Iraq’s first democratic election. It was never certain whether the long-oppressed Shiites would have enough sense of nation and sense of compromise to govern rather than rule. The answer is now clear: United in a dominating coalition, they do not.

And yes, Krauthammer is still publishing his nonsense in the POST and can be seen almost daily on FOX. He is one of many who was wrong about everything and was a Bush cheer leader until the war he pushed went south. Now of course the war has failed because of George W. Bush or the Iraqis themselves. Why would anyone still listen to any of these people?

Glenn also has a post over on his own blog where he takes John McCain to task, John McCain's war against reality. McCain is a pathetic creature who is incoherently delusional.