WWCD? - What Would Clinton Do?

Spin be damned, no one can pretend at this late date that the war in Iraq was anything other than a long-held wish of the Right made suddenly possible by the gift from Heaven on nine-eleven.

Hawks from Wolfowitz down had been dreaming for thirty years of the day we could go back and undo the damage to the power of the Executive branch wrought by Vietnam and Watergate. The most recent iteration of this nutty fantasy involved going back to Baghdad and "doing it right," destroying Saddam Hussein and ushering in a new moral age of U.S. military credibility and might. To hell with realpolitik, it's hip to talk Good n' Evil in the White House again! they crowed. And let us not forget the side benefits of racking up fabulous wealth for the few and rolling back the social changes that have taken place in the intervening years, as gravy.

The White House fed the people the corn fodder of "war as a last resort" while outing its own secret agents, sabotaging its own diplomats, and snubbing the expert opinions of the nation and the entire world as it raced to war.

Those corn-fed cows are coming home, and it’s about time. Polls show that a critical mass of Americans now understand that the rationale for war, as stated by the president and his cohort, was as fictitious as an Anne Rice novel, and only a thousand time scarier.

Nevertheless, the Right refuses to face the facts, which will continue to trickle out , a document here, a deposition there, a little at a time until whatever grisly end eventually arrives. When faced with the proof of lying at the White House and the manipulation of intelligence - and immediately before commencing the name-calling - the neo-con artists do little more than trot out the old chestnuts that used to work so well in any situation: blame, blame, blame.

Read the blogosphere today and you’ll hear the latest Party Line: "Clinton's people believed in Saddam’s nukes and WMD, too, so I guess that makes you Liberals hypocrites."

Reality check: regardless of what the previous administration knew, didn't know, thought they knew but were wrong, etc. - THEY DIDN'T INVADE IRAQ.

The point doesn't hold a molecule of water. In spite of a strongly-held belief that Saddam was seeking WMD & “nuclear” weapons (remember when we could pronounce it correctly?), the Clinton administration, after assessing the intelligence and conferring with experts on both sides of the political divide including Bush The Elder’s team, chose to heed the warnings of the broad consensus of the world's most knowledgeable experts and hold off on an invasion.

In contrast, Bush The Junior and the Wolfowitz-Cheneyists invaded with no plan for an occupation and with a one-man plan for postwar Iraq (Ahmed Chalabi). This, like everything else the White House has done since 9/11, was incompetently planned, based on ideology rather than reality, and clearly warned against.

And not by Liberals, my Right wing friends, but by everyone -- including Brent Scowcroft and the first President Bush, who was faced with some similar choices years earlier.

I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would be wishing for a president like Junior's dad. It just shows how wrong you can be.

I love you all, America; right, left, and chicken wing, your negativity notwithstanding. America could have been a beautiful and fair country once upon a time and still could be so again. Hope we get through this alive. Say a prayer for the common foot soldier.

Peace.