Say Anything Blog

I was going to quote a few good chunks but there’s too much, it’s all quotable.  Well worth the read. 

Bush communicates a hope in the future and plots a clear path.  It’s a strength and a weakness, he leaves an unobstructed path for people to lie or twist the past.  Once the more immediate threat was knocked off the list he moved onto the next but it’s nice to periodically look back and do a feel good list of accomplishments.

Here’s an inconvenient quote from his article:

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics’ misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

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Mike,

The reasons one goes to war and the reasons one stays put afterwards to stabilize and rebuild need not be the same.

Out Here
Rodney G. Graves

Ceterum censeo Parthia esse delendam
Latin: “Furthermore, Parthia (Persia aka modern day Iran) should be destroyed.”

So, you will continue to pretend the 100s of thousands of binary artillery and rocket rounds, the thousands of tons of chemicals, the equipment for processing the chemicals and placing them into the binary rds and the personnel trained to use that equipment and those chemicals never existed? You are calling the United Nations a liar?

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Rodney:

The reasons one goes to war and the reasons one stays put afterwards to stabilize and rebuild need not be the same.

Well exactly.  But Bush enumerated the reasons for going to war in his speech to Congress prior to their vote for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.  It may have taken Feith a while to come to term with some of those reasons, but just because he didn’t see them, doesn’t mean that Bush wasn’t enough of a visionary to see them himself.  I get the point of the analytic analysis of the shift of the focus, but shift in focus is not the same thing as saying “he wasn’t thinking of this before or didn’t think that was important”.  Obviously it was important enough to make it into the precious real estate of a speech before Congress.

It’s a great article and thanks for Robert108 for what to me is the summary statement that even the most stubborn, anti-Bush people should accept as a basic truth of the causes and justifications for the war.

By the way, I’ll point out that Feith has a longer version of this in his recently published book War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (Hardcover).

Mysteriously neither the New York Times or the Washington Post felt it worth the bother to review.  Nonetheless even without their grace on it, I plan on purchasing the book and reading it.

Do so, Carrick! It is a good summary, and pulls together many disparate elements of this whole tangle. Which the left tend to ignore the inconvenient pieces of.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Carrick,

My copy of [url="http://www.amazon.com/War-Decision-Inside-Pentagon-Terrorism/dp/0060899735"]War
and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism
(Hardcover)[/url] is sitting on our (home) library desk.  I’m still reading Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism at the moment (and taking copious notes for later use), but hope my work schedule will ease up soon such that I can move on to Feith’s book (which I also plan on taking copious notes from).  I actually wrote to Jonah asking if he had an electronic version, but he only has the galley’s and manuscripts as such and declined to share (which was entirely reasonable on his part).

I think I understand why President Bush changed emphasis, and chose not to refight the “why we went to war” battle to focus instead on ensuring the outcome he desires.  Based on what we have seen, the MSM was not going to report anything which ran counter to their narrative.  This dereliction is further demonstrated by the inexcusable editorial decision to not review War and Decision.

I firmly believe that history will be far kinder to President Bush than it will be to his critics and the MSM (as if there is a difference there).

Out Here
Rodney G. Graves

Ceterum censeo Parthia esse delendam
Latin: “Furthermore, Parthia (Persia aka modern day Iran) should be destroyed.”

I’m just glad that others have noticed the change in emphasis...I was pretty sure that it had but some comments at SA left me questioning my memory and/or sanity.

I see Scotty Mc has a book out too.

"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced if the nation doesn’t want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
Cicero, 55 BC

As the situation has changed, the emphasis has changed.  It’s the way things work in the real world.  We’re winning.

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