Tuesday, August 5, 2008

CIA Forgery for Bush to go to War?

Ron Suskind apparently has a book that makes this claim. A reader at Sullivan pointed out some problems with this. Really the only thing I want to comment about is his one point that, if this really happened, it wouldn't have been ordered on White House stationary, it would have been paperless. To which the first response that came to mind was, "Yes, that is what you would expect from someone who was actually COMPETENT." Something which this administration has demonstrated over and over that it clearly is not. That is all.

1 comment:

Larry Hamelin said...

I think issues like this are something of a distraction.

Even if we were to reliably know that it had been "honestly" justified, the war in Iraq would not be any more acceptable.

If we were to to reliably know that the war had been "dishonestly" justified, making a big issue about it would simply entail that we make "honest" mistakes in the future.

We have a military larger, more powerful and more expensive than the rest of the world put together. It is ludicrous to believe we can be coerced in any meaningful, internal sense by an outside agency.

It's trivially obvious that for this reason any justification for aggression must be wrong in some sense. By focusing on some accidental characteristic that might be right, we necessarily distract ourselves from the essential characteristics that must be wrong.