"... here we go again - there was no 'real' reason to go to war with Iraq - except since the end of hostilities in 91 everyone approached the Iraq problem as if another war would eventually be necessary - it was a war of choice, we all understand that - why is that being treated here as an astounding insight?
Bush et al 'lied', or rather, were not entirely transparent, or rather massaged the truth in service of an agenda - again, this not unusual - Lincoln did it, FDR did, Churchill did it, hell your boy Obama just did it re Afghanistan if Woodward is to be believed, committing troops to a war he quite obviously no longer believes is 'good' and 'necessary' - taking liberties with the truth and war always have and always will go hand in hand. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing - I'm just saying acting, as liberals do, as if Bush invented the idea of being less than honest in the promotion of a war strategy indicates either a disingenuous or hysterical point of view.
The question is was America specifically lied into a war by Bush and the boys that it had no business being involved in, a much more serious charge and one that Shelton seems to be making - but that charge would only be valid if America had no vital strategic interests in Iraq and had outright lied about WMDs merely to, for instance, steal oil - none of which is the case. What it comes down to rather is an interpretation of events and how one interprets events very much depends on one's ideological predisposition - to a liberal like Ricks the answer is obvious and thus his promotion of Shelton's book - but for a realist based conservative it's not so clear - we were already at war with Iraq and a quite rational although by no means unimpeachable case could be made that to put an end to it now while the opportunity presented itself would serve well our long term interests - that Rumsfeld screwed up the war plan has very little to do with whether the war itself made sense, a distinction liberals constantly fail to make.
But whether they lied about WMDs to sell the war - that case is closed, it's clear they [and many others] actually believed they were there - where the 'truth' starts to slip away is when they claim that WMDs were what the war was about - they weren't, they were merely the pretext - the war was always about dramatically changing the strategic map of the Middle East - but again liberals always conveniently ignore that distinction because because 'lying about WMDs' is a much juicier story.
Again, did Lincoln ever tell the country or the soldiers fighting the Civil War that they were making the great sacrifice in order to secure the commercial interests of the North? Or that after so many had died to free the slaves that he hoped, right up until his assassination, to eventually ship them all off to Panama because they really weren't worth the immense trouble of keeping them around? How one interprets these things is all about ideological prejudices - what Shelton's are, I don't know - Mr Ricks' are not in doubt though..."
