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Rove: No Bush War for Democracy in Iraq
As millions of Iraqis braved bomb blasts and threats of violence to vote this weekend, voices across the political spectrum in the U.S. praised the democratic elections. But while President Obama announced that "Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process," his conservative opponents claimed vindication for George W. Bush and his war on Saddam. Left out of their narrative, of course, is the inconvenient truth that the United States did not go to war to bring democracy to Iraq. And we know this, because Karl Rove told us so.
In his new memoir Courage and Consequence, Bush's brain defended the war in Iraq and especially the hyping of the nonexistent threat from Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. But as the New York Times summarized Rove's book ("Rove on Iraq: Without W.M.D. Threat, Bush Wouldn't Have Gone to War"), it was only the specter of the "smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" and not the promise democracy in Mesopotamia which enabled the Bush administration to sell the invasion to Congress and the American people:
While the opportunity to bring democracy to the Middle East as a bulwark against Islamic extremism "justified the decision to remove Saddam Hussein," Mr. Rove makes clear that from the start, at least, the suspected weapons and their perceived threat were the primary justification for war.
"Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D.? I doubt it," he writes. "Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations."
He adds: "So, then, did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not." But Mr. Rove said the White House had only a "weak response" to the harmful allegation, which became "a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency."
To be sure, even after leaving office the Bush White House team and its allies continued to defend the supposed "bad intelligence" they claimed lay behind their WMD doomsday scenarios and to peddle the myth of Saddam's link to 9/11 and Al Qaeda. But in December 2008 as now, Karl Rove insisted no WMD threat meant no war with Saddam's Iraq:
"Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s."
But in the run-up to this weekend's elections in Iraq, conservatives trumpeted the looming vote - and a Newsweek cover story - as vindication of the wisdom of the Bush doctrine in bringing democracy to Iraq.
Over at the National Review, Pete Wehner approvingly cited this Newsweek quote:
Bush's rhetoric about democracy came to sound as bitterly ironic as his pumped-up appearance on an aircraft carrier a few months earlier, in front of an enormous banner that declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. And yet it has to be said and it should be understood--now, almost seven hellish years later--that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.
After declaring last Tuesday that "deeply heartening" development "didn't happen by accident," Wehner the next day offered a near-hagiographic portrait of George W. Bush as liberator of Iraq. Largely ignoring the original rationale for the war and the much-strengthened Iran it produced, Wehner lauds "the idea of consensual government" as "a gift we gave the Iraqis at the cost of many American lives and much treasure," adding, "It is a gift they appear to have received."
"What America has done for Iraq, which had been brutalized for so long, may not be the noblest act in our history. But it ranks quite high. The Iraq war was, in fact, a war of liberation. And the liberation appears to be working."
Two days later on March 5, Wehner's National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg declared that history would be kind to President Bush:
What most Americans care about is winning -- or, more accurately, winning in a good cause. Public attitudes are still raw when it comes to the war, and for good reason. But a generation from now, if Iraq is a stable, prosperous democracy, Americans will in all likelihood think the war was worth it, and that George W. Bush was right.
Perhaps. But even giving Goldberg the benefit of the doubt, a "stable, prosperous democracy" is not the "good cause" either the Bush administration or the American people had in mind in toppling Saddam. As I noted five years ago in "The Myth of the Bush Doctrine":
In fact, the word "democracy" is for all intents and purposes missing from the Bush administration's rhetoric regarding the War on Terror prior to the invasion of Iraq. There is no mention of "democracy" in President Bush's address to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001. Aside from a reference to Russia, it cannot be found in the June 2002 West Point speech. Democracy was absent from Bush's September 12, 2002 address to the UN and his October 7, 2002 Iraq war justification in Cincinnati. And in the run-up to the invasion, democracy promotion remained essentially invisible in the 2003 State of the Union (ironically, it is mentioned regarding Iran), March 17 press conference, and even during Bush's March 19 address to the nation declaring the commencement of hostilities. The closest the President could come was one of his favorite platitudes.
"Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity."
As Karl Rove reminded us this week, in 2003 delivering God's gift simply had not become an American national security requirement. Eliminating weapons of mass destruction was. Put another way, George W. Bush didn't invade Iraq to promote democracy; he promoted democracy because he invaded Iraq.
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