WORDS AND DEEDS….Andrew Sullivan is perplexed by President Bush’s admittedly incomprehensible approach to the Iraq war:
We were told by the president that the Iraq war was the critical battle in the war on terror, an effort of enormous stakes that we couldn’t possibly lose. And then he went to war with half the troops necessary to win, with no plan for the aftermath, and refused to budge even when this became obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain.
This is followed by a long string of “He says [blank]” accompanied by evidence that Bush rather obviously doesn’t believe [blank].
But it’s not just the Iraq war and it’s not just Bush. It’s the entire Republican leadership. For example, they claim to be worried about nuclear terrorism, but they pay virtually no serious attention to counterproliferation issues and have routinely opposed proposals for tighter port security.
They claim to be concerned about the future financial impact of Social Security deficits, but for short-term electoral reasons they have blithely passed tax cuts and a Medicare prescription bill that do far more damage to our future finances than Social Security ever will.
They claim that democracy promotion is the cornerstone of their foreign policy, but they’ve budgeted only a pittance for programs that might genuinely encourage democracy, and have applied serious public pressure only to regimes that are already administration b?te-noirs for other reasons.
I could go on, but I’ll spare you. The obvious conclusion is that they didn’t think Iraq was the central front on the war on terror back in 2002. They don’t think nuclear terrorism is really that big a deal. They aren’t worried about long term finances. And they don’t really care very much about democracy promotion. They just say these things because they’re convenient.
It’s this simple: these guys say a lot of stuff they don’t believe. Their words are largely meaningless. There’s no paradox, and there’s really not much point in trying to make it more complicated.
