William Kristol's Revisionist History

Atrios noticed something interesting in regards to William Kristol's interview on Thursday's 'Colbert Report' (covered in detail by me here). Kristol was forced to rejustify the neoconservative worldview and the Iraq war. In his responses, he mentioned nothing about WMDs or Al Qaeda connections, which were the two big selling points that they used to start this war in 2002/2003. Instead, he pushed the revisionist history that it was all about Saddam's human rights record and removing a dictator from power. After Colbert called it a "grand experiment", Kristol got defensive and stated that the neoconservative foreign policy is "an unfortunate necessity that you cannot allow dictators to kill their own people and you cannot allow dictators to threaten their neighbors". Colbert's retort was to mockingly expose how the U.S. only went after the one dictator (can't imagine why they picked him *cough*) and does not take down others.

But Atrios took a look back and noticed something important- Human rights concerns were not mentioned at all in the Project For A New American Century's 1998 letter to President Clinton. Rather, the letter simply mentions the threat Saddam supposedly posed to us, the issue of WMDs, and the need to "protect our vital interests in the Gulf". That's one thing I hit on in my writeup last year, the fact that the neoconservative policy was always only about protecting U.S. interests in the global market, not human rights and not the export of democracy.

The Iraqi people- and their plight- had nothing to do with why this war began. However, that emotional appeal has been a very good way for the administration to retroactively justify the invasion now that their original case for war has entirely fallen apart. And they use that appeal shamelessly. If you were against the war, you therefore must've been for Saddam's regime and the suffering of Iraqis. Rereading the Project's 1998 letter, it's clear their hearts were bleeding for oil the Iraqi people.

Helen Thomas was right last month to ask the President why we really went to war. The truth has been obscured by so much spin from all sides of this debate. Maybe one day, we'll finally hear the answer to her question.