Andrew Sullivan points out that Bush isn't the only one who changed his tune on important stuff like Iraq. Cheney said this back in 1992:
"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq... All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq."
Sullivan also has this thoughtful and thought-provoking email from a fellow conservative who, unlike most/all of the neocons and chickenhawks, actually lived in the Arab world for a time...
When the invasion of Iraq was being debated, I had just returned from two years in Morocco and my now wife had just returned from a year in Egypt. We both considered supporting the war. The Arab world is mired in a political culture obsessed with blaming others for their misfortunes and obsessing over Israel while doing nothing to find practical solutions to their own problems closer to home.
---
We both thought that a shock to the system and a scheme to jar at least one Arab country onto the right track might be worth it. In the end, we both decided that it would be a bad idea, and for good conservative reasons. Utopian social programs rarely work domestically, in circumstances in which the architects of social engineering share a language and culture with their subjects and in which the surrounding society is stable and prosperous. If this is the case, how can we expect a radical experiment in social engineering to succeed in a foreign country with a radically different culture, and in which distrust of the United States is imbibed with mother's milk? Arabs are fixated enough on what they perceive as past humiliations, how can adding another defeat to the list help them?
Subsequent rationales for the war were not convincing. Engage the terrorists in Iraq or face them here? Does anyone really believe that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had a one-way ticket to the US and a scholarship at a flight school but decided to turn around and have a go at us in Iraq after he heard about the invasion? Iraq, in fact, supplies a theater for attacking the US that most of the fighters there, foreign and Iraqi, would not have if we had not given it to them. If Saddam Hussein were still in power, we could continue to contain him for 2 billion per year and when his system did finally collapse, it would be up to Iraqis to sort out the mess, not us. As for Blair's claim that Muslim militants hate the West for our very existence, I don't buy it. Resent us, yes. Envy us, sure. But if we didn't meddle in Middle Eastern affairs, I doubt they would attack us. Bush's claim in his first public statement after 9/11 that they hate us for our freedom is a close parallel to the claim of Muslim militants that we hate them for their core identity and values, that is, that we hate them for being Muslims, that we hate Islam as such.---
Now, we are stuck fighting to try to democratize a polity that is inherently unstable. If there are democratic elections, the result is not likely to be a liberal democracy, but rather one of the illiberal sort. Defeat would be a disaster, victory will be hard to define and unlikely to bring great reward. I agree with Christopher Hitchens that it is shameful to be wishing defeat on the US in Iraq in the hopes that this translates into defeat for Bush at home. I agree that we have to face the fact that we are committed in Iraq now and cannot afford to talk about the past as though turning back the clock were an option. I am no fan of Kerry. Despite all of this, I don't want to hand another four years to a man who brought us unnecessarily into this predicament at such great cost and who waged this war so incompetently. This, combined with the irresponsible economic policy that you have also criticized, have convinced me to cast my vote for Kerry. We cannot afford to dwell on the past at the expense of engaging with the present as it is. But neither can we forget past lapses of judgment and hope that they will not occur again.
I hope this guy talks to other conservatives... and talks some sense into them.
