CasdraBlog

I heard his speech on the radio and it was good and sounded heartfelt. One of the central tenets of the speech was refuting the idea that we had any choice at all in the invasion of Iraq. He claimed that there was no status quo that we could leave. This is almost certainly true in the long term – but was the rush to war that we went through justified. Nick Confessore wrote about this after the speech on Tapped

Michael Moore makes an appearance in McCain's speech is to provide the senator with the requisite straw man -- someone who believes Iraq is an "oasis of peace" to go along with the unnamed people, presumably Democratic peaceniks, who supposedly supported freeing Saddam Hussein from the box of sanctions and the threat of military force. This is not to say that McCain's argument is entirely poppycock. Many smart analysts on both the right and the left believed that the costs of keeping Saddam boxed in were so high relative to the costs to Saddam of being boxed that, over time, the status quo would erode and war might someday be necessary to prevent his resurgence.

But no credible voice in the Democratic foreign policy establishment was calling for an end to sanctions or backing down from our deployments in the Persian Gulf, nor considered Saddam an angel. The bottom line is that the choice McCain posited last night was a false one. It was not a choice between knocking Saddam off on the one hand, and letting him acquire nukes on the other. On the central justification for the Iraq War -- preventing a dictator from developing a WMD capability -- the inspections regime worked, showing before the invasion what is now undeniable: Saddam didn't pose a threat to us at the time. Certainly there was no "imminent threat" justifying a rush to war that alienated us from the very allies we need to pick apart terrorist networks. This is undeniable. It is a fact. McCain is ignoring it. Look at the elisions of McCain's own language: He never specifies which "terrible weapons" Saddam had, exactly, because that would tie McCain up in logical knots as he tries to defend Bush.

He also notes, shortly thereafter, that "the central security concern of our time is to keep such devastating weapons beyond the reach of terrorists who can't be dissuaded from using them by the threat of mutual destruction." McCain has a point, assuming by "devastating weapons" he's talking about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, Bush's record on this issue is horrendous. We spent billions of dollars and seriously overstretched our armed forces to knock off a dictator who didn't have any of these weapons, something our inspectors told us before we pulled the trigger. Meanwhile, Bush, through inattention and bungled diplomacy, has allowed North Korea, a known proliferator run by a madman, to develop a much more robust nuclear capability. He praised the Nunn-Lugar threat reduction initiative -- a bulwark against the serious threat of poorly-guarded and very real Soviet-era nukes falling into the hands of terrorists -- but then cut its funding. And where was the Bush administration when Pakistan let A.Q. Khan off with a slap on the wrist, after it turned out he was exporting nuclear weapons technology to anyone with the cash? Oh, yeah -- they were busy coddling Pervez Musharraf's government to make sure they'd catch some al-Qaeda officials during the Democratic convention.

I wonder if Kerry will be about to steer the pubic debate to these kind of issues. Will the media let him? The next stop is the first presidential debate.