REMEMBER HOW THE BUSHIES JUSTIFIED IRAQ?

After no WMD were found, we were often told that spreading Democracy in the Arab part of the world was a justification for toppling Saddam.  Paul Wolfowitz remarked that this was nonsense and so did Richard Perle.

Donald Rumsfeld was plugging his new book on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and offered more confirmation that the Spreading Democracy meme is a lie:

HH: Now extensively described in Known And Unknown, Chapters 30-31, Out Of The Box and Regime Change, are all the reasons that were given for going to war with Iraq, which you did to as opposed to not going to war with Iran. And among them, and this is really the central intellectual issue in the book, is why does the United States go to war and when. And you detail all of these different things, and you say, though, that bringing democracy to Iraq had not been among the primary rationales. Eight years ago, Nick Lemann in the New Yorker, before you guys went to war and launched it, wrote, “Yet another argument for war which has emerged during the last few months is that removing Saddam could bring about a wholesale change for the better in the political, cultural and economic climate of the Arab Middle East.” And Lemann assigns that to Wolfowitz, your deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. How much was this democracy movement on President Bush’s mind before the war began, Secretary Rumsfeld? And how much of that is a make good when the WMD weren’t found?

DR: That’s hard to answer. I don’t recall the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq as being part of the discussions in the National Security Council during the period with a build up towards the conflict with Iraq. It is, as you suggest, that, those words tended to become more prominent after the war had, major combat operations had been completed, and the subject of WMD had not been found in the kinds of supplies that had been anticipated, although there were certainly people capable of that. And the Duelfer report shows that Saddam Hussein indeed had maintained his capability to rapidly increase his weapons of mass destruction.

HH: So you don’t recall deputy secretary Wolfowitz making that argument?


DR: I don’t, and I don’t recall the President doing it, or Secretary Powell.