The Wars Have Been Berry Goot to the Republicans
Paul Krugman gets close to a concept that I thought of from the very beginning of the sales job leading up to the Iraq War:
"I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war."
He doesn't quite go there, but to me, the next logical step to this, cynical as it sounds, is that war can be a useful tool for the party in power to get re-elected. The whole changing one's horse in mid-stream concept. It is a staggering thought that one of the main motivations for going to war in Iraq under false pretenses was to maintain power, but this administration has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that politics and maintaining power trumps everything else.
I mean, it has been well-documented that the president was telling everyone he wanted to link Saddam to 9/11, within days of that tragedy, even though everyone knew it was Al Qaeda and Bin Laden who masterminded the thing. Why would he bother trying to tie Saddam to 9/11? I suppose because of the neo-cons having the agenda to want to go in there, although it is still not clear to me why they thought it was a good idea. Oil? Maybe. But the fact is that within days of 9/11, someone in the administration realized that 9/11 could be used to justify all the things they wanted to do, but didn't really have a good reason to: the Iraq war, the unitary executive president, torture, illegal wiretapping, etc, etc, ETC!
"I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war."
He doesn't quite go there, but to me, the next logical step to this, cynical as it sounds, is that war can be a useful tool for the party in power to get re-elected. The whole changing one's horse in mid-stream concept. It is a staggering thought that one of the main motivations for going to war in Iraq under false pretenses was to maintain power, but this administration has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that politics and maintaining power trumps everything else.
I mean, it has been well-documented that the president was telling everyone he wanted to link Saddam to 9/11, within days of that tragedy, even though everyone knew it was Al Qaeda and Bin Laden who masterminded the thing. Why would he bother trying to tie Saddam to 9/11? I suppose because of the neo-cons having the agenda to want to go in there, although it is still not clear to me why they thought it was a good idea. Oil? Maybe. But the fact is that within days of 9/11, someone in the administration realized that 9/11 could be used to justify all the things they wanted to do, but didn't really have a good reason to: the Iraq war, the unitary executive president, torture, illegal wiretapping, etc, etc, ETC!
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