Other Crap

Daily Show: Stewart - Save the Date! You were right about the war. Won't your coffee shop/bookstore/poetry jamatorium friend be impressed?

• How soon we forget. Actually, it is old news that the White House planned to go to war under any circumstances while telling the public that war could be avoided. Ari Fleischer got caught in this lie in his infamous February 28th, 2003 press conference, in which he admitted that Saddam could not stay in power even if he turned over every last pea shooter in the country. Fleischer claimed that the policy goal had always been disarmament PLUS regime change, which was news to the press corps.
• If you stop and think about it a different way, the administration's posturings were actually a bit of military genius. They were leading Saddam to believe he could stay in power by destroying weapons. But they intended to invade all along, and they wanted him to destroy weapns in order to weaken Iraq's ability to respond. Saddam was just making Iraq's military defeat that much more certain by destroying his weapons! If you put a different spin on it, the administration could reasonably argue that their bold lies were strategic tactics which may have saved thousands of American lives in the invasion.
• On the other hand, they could have saved even more by not invading at all, so history's judgment still boils down to whether the invasion was justified in the first place, irrespective of when the final decision to go to war was actually made.