I’ve stopped reading Instapundit on a daily basis, instead hitting his site about once a week to get the latest on whatever blogging fad he’s linking at the moment. So I missed a post from last Thursday in which he addresses the leftist fallacy that freeing Iraq and making way for democracy in that country is/was a bogus claim/reason made by the Bush administration and war supporters after the fact of the war and the WMD that failed to surface in Iraq.
He brings up a few links that I missed when I addressed this issue back in…oh, January. The money quote, from Ian Hamlet, and which I wholeheartedly believe is true: “The reason a large block of the country doesn’t recall Bush’s speeches calling for Iraqi liberation is that they simply were not listening. After all, they had already decided that they knew what Bush “really” meant, so they ignored what he said.”
I can think of at least one person who thinks that our inaction in Darfur, Sudan is indicative of this administration’s true foreign policy, our arrogance as a nation, and the depths of lies to which the government has sunk AND to which the “loyal guard” of Republican supporters have fallen in stubbornly refusing to see the truth.
What I find interesting about that mindset is how it mirrors the selective memory Hamlet talks about in the preceding paragraph. It does not matter to the anti-war left that the Bush administration spent over a year and a half working with the international twinkletoes operation known as the United Nations to resolve the Iraq situation in a peaceful manner. More than just the two major, news-making UN resolutions were passed authorizing force to be used in ousting Hussein from leadership. And the world did seem at the brink of some collective agreement that action needed to be taken.
The wheels of power move slowly, they do. It isn’t surprising that an already hamfisted organization like the UN would take as long as it has to collect its scattered head and decide to take action in Sudan. But look at the timetable. It mirrors what began in the early months of 2002, after the world began to breathe again after 9/11.
Yet once again, we are hearing the familiar refrain. Is Iraq a simple matter? Is there reason to suspect that the recent optimism coming out of Iraq is the result of “bogus” reasoning on the part of the Bush administration?
The fevered imaginations of some people who seem to think that their wild claims make any sense when paired against a comprehensive Google search–does that matter?
I thought not too.