BUSH AND FREEDOM

The Right is trying to get us to believe that Bush had the freedom of Iraq and the subsequent "domino effect" of freedom throughout the Arab World as the real reason for the Iraq invasion from the start. I don't think we should confuse the word idea with the term main idea. He certainly mentioned it immediately after 9/11 when he announced that we would end state sponsorship of terrorism........

we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them

and he did mention replacing tyrannical regimes with democracy. This was a radical departure from the old Roosevelt through Clinton policies of "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB." Since FDR we had always replaced a strong man with another strong man (dictator) that we could "handle." The Bushies didn't talk about freedom much, and we all forgot about it. Sometime in early 2004 somebody in power got a hold of the gallies from Sharansky's book. Bush and his staff read it----everyone in the Administration read it----and suddenly they made establishing a democracy in Iraq and the entire Middle East our main policy as if it had always been thus. The reality is that Sharasky showed the Administration how to sell the policy. The actual Iraq war was begun on false intel. Period. A look at the 2003 State of the Union address mentioned no policy of freeing the oppressed, even as an afterthought.

In fairness, Paul Wolfowitz DID have the idea as far back as 1992

In 1992 he and Lewis Libby wrote Defense Planning Guidance for Dick Cheney. This was a classified document but excerpts were leaked to the New York Times. Senator Joseph Biden was horrified, and described the documents as a prescription for "literally a Pax Americana."

Wolfowitz's notions about freedom being contageous have a long tail. He has been public about it since 9/12. As you all know, I have never been in the Bush is a moron camp, always thinking that he is smart as hell, so I don't think that the one lone voice of Paul Wolfowitz shaped Bush's thinking on Iraq. He, Rice, Cheney, and most everyone was sure the bad intel was in fact correct before the war; the freedom as a beacon for all oppressed peoples was only in the back of Bush's mind---at first. The shift into making freedom the main goal came out of political necessity, and the White House has done a good job of making everyone think that this was always a primary goal. There's a good old piece HERE. Bush made this shift in his State of the Union Address in 2004 and we are just now coming to realize it. Wolfowitz clearly articulated the idea of freedom of peoples as opposed to governments becoming "liberal" back in '02.

To win the war against terrorism and, in so doing, help shape a more peaceful world, we must speak to the hundreds of millions of moderate and tolerant people in the Muslim world, regardless of where they live, who aspire to enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy and free enterprise. These are sometimes described as "Western values," but, in fact, they are universal.

I think that Bush had his fall back position way back then.