Redefining Wrongness

Glenn Greenwald takes a trip on the wayback machine to find Islamophobe prophet Mark Steyn's words from May 4, 2003. He quotes the neocon "foreign policy genius" as he wrote about the "fact" that the U.S. won the war in Iraq so quickly and easily:

This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon's Failed War Plan. . .

...It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body.

Glenn is searingly correct that the neocons "are so wrong that it re-defines wrongness". He writes that:

The same people who were wrong about everything -- literally -- and who viciously mocked those who were right, now want to use the same mindset and assumptions to guide us into our next war. That really is what Democrats ought to be asking the country this year -- whether they want those who promised quick victory in Iraq, and who proclaimed that we had quick victory, to be able to lead us into more wars of the same kind.

Charles Krauthammer today came out and explicitly said that it is necessary for us to confront Iran militarily, i.e., start a new war against Iran. Democrats should make this election about this question because it is, in large part, what the election is about -- whether the country wants the same people who dragged us into Iraq to do the same in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Krauthammer - he of the face like a mouthful of pickled onions - wrote this today:

Realistically speaking, the point of this multilateral exercise cannot be to stop Iran's nuclear program by diplomacy. That has always been a fantasy. It will take military means. There would be terrible consequences from an attack. These must be weighed against the terrible consequences of allowing an openly apocalyptic Iranian leadership to acquire weapons of genocide.

The point of the current elaborate exercise in multilateral diplomacy is to slightly alter that future calculation. By demonstrating extraordinary forbearance and accommodation, perhaps we will have purchased the acquiescence of our closest allies -- Britain, Germany and, yes, France -- to a military strike on that fateful day when diplomacy has run its course.

No mention that enriching uranium for nuclear fuel is allowed under membership of the NPT or that the IAEA are adamant that they have found NO evidence of a nuclear weapon program in what they describe as three years of "intrusive" searching. In other words, the neocons have ginned up the "Iran Crisis" from whole cloth - demanding an invasion based upon a fantasy of weapons and unilaterally declaring illegal that which is legal.

They've repeated the lies so often that even many Democrats now believe them. That's why even though I agree with Glenn that the Dems should speak up against the war narrative and point out the neocon failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon I personally don't hold out much hope of that happening. American foreign policy is based upon the needs of short-term domestic politics and is then inflicted upon foreigners - no matter how disasterous the consequences. The Dem leadership are too afraid of losing the midterms and '08 to risk changing that.