{"id":4024,"date":"2009-01-21T06:11:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-21T11:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4024"},"modified":"2009-01-19T13:35:17","modified_gmt":"2009-01-19T18:35:17","slug":"through-the-past-darkly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4024","title":{"rendered":"Through The Past Darkly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listening to Bush’s final presser last week, I heard the President talk about the regrets he has over his terms in office.<\/p>\n

The big one?\u00a0 That the intel about the WMD turned out to be wrong.<\/p>\n

At the time, I was upset about the Administration’s focus on WMD in “selling” the liberation of Iraq.\u00a0 There were – as even noted neocons like Nick Lemann in that conservative hothouse the New Yorker <\/em>noted<\/a>– four grounds for going to deposing Hussein:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Repeated violations of UN resolutions re his nuke program and the no-fly zone.<\/li>\n
  2. Repeated, horrendous human rights abuses<\/li>\n
  3. Support for terror (not “Al Quaeda” or “9\/11”, but plenty of others)<\/li>\n
  4. Finally, the WMD.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    “Why”, I asked at the time “is the Administration not hitting all four of these justifications equally hard?”\u00a0 <\/em>It was one of my <\/em>big regrets of the Administration.<\/p>\n

    And yet at almost six years’ remove, it occurs to me that, for purposes of convincing Congress and especially the world at large, that…:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Nobody has ever <\/em>cared about UN resolutions.\u00a0 None are ever <\/em>worth the paper they’re printed on (except in the odd case of the occasional government figure who takes the UN seriously – like George HW Bush, who obeyed the UN and didn’t depose Hussein in 1991); who would care?<\/li>\n
    2. The people of Haditha were guilty of dying while brown.\u00a0 Western elites don’t generally care about human rights abuses against brown people (at least not those that can’t be used to discredit conservative Western governments – see the 1984 Ethiopian Famine or Abu Ghraib).<\/li>\n
    3. Hussein mainly supported terror aimed at other Arabs, and at Israel.\u00a0 Who cared?<\/li>\n
    4. On the other hand, in 2002 – when the rubble from the World Trade Center had barely stopped smoldering?\u00a0 The next one could hit Cambridge,Tribeca or Berkeley<\/em>!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Unfortunate, but understandable under the circumstances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Listening to Bush’s final presser last week, I heard the President talk about the regrets he has over his terms in office. The big one?\u00a0 That the intel about the WMD turned out to be wrong. At the time, I was upset about the Administration’s focus on WMD in “selling” the liberation of Iraq.\u00a0 There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}