This Is Good Stuff....

My friend Matt's response after hearing a talk by the Heritage Foundation's Peter Brookes on the future challenges of U.S. foreign policy.... check out the full text at: http://woodshavingsdaily.blogspot.com/2006/03/when-i-was-in-high-school.html - it is well worth it...

"...This is where Brookes' argument starts to lose coherence if morality, responsibility and accountability mean anything in the sordid affair we call international relations. If he was for the Iraq war on the grounds the president ventured -- i.e. human rights as well as national security -- then he should be able to say that prior U.S. policy towards Iraq was misguided because, in a sense, we are making amends for the wrongs we perpetuated on the Iraqi people more than a decade and a half ago and that it made the U.S. less safe in the process (a Hitchensesque argument). Simply, without the knowledge of chemical weapons the West gave him and our shut mouth policy toward his deployment of them, Hussein would have had a harder time killing innocents and violating the laws of war.

Of course Brookes can always fall back on realpolitik as a bulwark against this line of moralist reasoning, but then, all I have to ask of him is this: Could the Bush Administration have persuaded the American people initially into supporting the war in Iraq once they discovered WMDs didn't exist or at least weren't there in the volume the President maintained?"

My response?

"Matt - you are right on on this... I watched two documentaries today as part of PBS's "Frontline" series 'Truth, War and Consequences' and 'The War Behind Closed Doors' that posed similar questions.Regardless of the administration's current line of 'staying the course', shouldn't there be a rejection of past mistakes? Or is the U.S., as Richard Perle seems to prove, incapable of doing so?"