Say Anything Blog

A YouTube video of President Dick Cheney talking down the invasion of Iraq in 1994 has been making the rounds on liberal blogs for the past week or so.  Now CNN has, predictably, picked up on the video (since things are going well in Iraq they need something to attack the Bush administration with):

I find it interesting that the same folks who seem to love the idea of folks like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Jack Murtha changing their minds about the war get all self-righteous when a member of the Bush administration is seen to have a change of heart.

Aren’t double standards a wonderful thing?

Regardless, to me the key on this sort of a shift in attitude has always been why the person in question is changing his/her mind.  In the case of Clinton, Edwards, Murtha, etc. their change in heart corresponded with a national election.  They didn’t change their minds on Iraq because of policy considerations, they did so because of politics.  They thought turning on the Bush administration on this issue would give them an edge in their careers, so they did it.

In the case of Cheney, in 1994 this country had a different view of the middle east.  We were willing to tolerate tyranny there.  We looked the other way on a lot of the oppression and outright murder that went on because we figured that stability, even at the sake of freedom and popular prosperity, was worth it considering our energy dependence on the region.  But then things changed.  9/11 happened, and we realized that our policy of tolerating tyranny in the middle east had resulted in fostering a threat from extremist Islam that was capable of hurting us even within our own borders.  We realized that we couldn’t tolerate oppression in the middle east any more because allowing it to exist unopposed has dire consequences for us.

Put bluntly, Cheney changed his mind because he wants to keep American interests both at home and abroad safe.  Democrats changed their mind on Iraq because they want to get themselves elected.  Now ask yourself: Which kind of leader do you want?  The one who puts national security first, or the one who puts winning elections first?

Now we either fight in the middle east and continue to build on the progress we’ve made in Iraq and Afghanistan or we go back to the endless loops of ineffective diplomacy that did nothing to stop people like Saddam Hussein previously.  The ineffective diplomacy that, in fact, fed Saddam’s regime (see: oil for food program).

I prefer the former of those two options, yet it seems like all of the “progressives” want to take a step backward.