One of the nice things about being a pundit is that your words still remain even when they seem (to those with any sense) embarrassing later on. William Kristol may be wrong about everything all the time, but he's also been consistent on many of his positions. Say what you will, but he's no flip-flopper...
Why...as he reminded us just three weeks after 9/11, he'd been calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein since 1998, in a letter sent to President Clinton signed by a
"Who's Who of senior ranking officials in this administration: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman, and National Security Council senior officials Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad.
"Saddam Hussein, because of his strategic position in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, surely represents a more potent challenge to the United States and its interests and principles than the weak, isolated, and we trust, soon-to-be crushed Taliban." See...getting rid of the people who attacked us on 9/11 would of course, be easy...but that barely even mattered since Saddam was the bigger problem anyway. The Taliban merely harbored Al Qaeda, but "evidence that Iraq may have aided in the horrific attacks of September 11 is beginning to accumulate. American intelligence officials have learned that one of the men who carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center, Mohammed Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Germany several months ago."
That would certainly make Saddam the biggest threat to world freedom (though of course, we now know that didn't really happen). Never mind the actions of Saudi Arabia (where most of the terrorists and much of their funding originated) and Pakistan (whose ISI Chief had wired money to Mohammad Atta right before 9/11-and conveniently retired quickly afterward...an interesting aside, he coincidentally had been meeting with future 9/11 Commissioner Bob Graham and future CIA head Porter Goss as the planes hit the towers!). Yeah...those guys are our allies after all. Saddam was the real danger.
We all knew that nobody WANTED war with Saddam though. Certainly, nobody had been cheerleading for it since 1997...
"Saddam has proven--he had proven by December 1997--that he will not disarm peacefully. And he must be disarmed. So war will come." Kristol wrote this just days before we began "shock and awe©" so I guess he isn't such a bad prognosticator, at least when it comes to when there's gonna be a war.
So President Bush held out as long as he could but Saddam just wouldn't disarm! He wouldn't show us his WMD's. Never mind that he turned out to have none: the best intelligence to be cherry-picked said he did. Why leave the inspectors (who Bush still seems convinced Saddam would not admit into the country, saying recently "And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.") there any longer? Back then, the absence of WMD's meant Saddam was hiding them. Then it meant he'd given them to Syria (presumably we hadn't been watching Saddam's doings for the past ten years).
Now? It's pretty irrelevant WHY we attacked Iraq. The fact was, three weeks after 9/11, though he actually gave lip service to Al Qaeda twice in his article, his main aim was still to attack Iraq! The great thing to Kristol and his ilk is that we finally did it! We finally had an administration made up of all the PNAC folks who sent that letter to Clinton and who are in position to have all the wars they want to! Of course, this is going to be a lot of wars it would seem. Back on May 12, 2003, Kristol wrote, "But the next great battle--not, we hope, a military battle--will be for Iran."
He would hate it if we had to have any more wars you see. Though, as ThinkProgress reminds us, on July 19, 2006 (on FoxNews), he said,
"We can try diplomacy. I’m not very hopeful about that. We have to be ready to use force." Kristol claimed the people of Iran would embrace "the right use of targeted military force." He added that military force could "trigger changes in Iran," causing them to embrace regime change.
Remember how well we're loved in Iraq? People just LOVE when a country uses targeted military force against them! That always makes people not angry against the aggressor (oops-liberator!) who is dropping bombs on their houses, but against their own leaders. You know, the way WE got mad at George Bush for ignoring all warning signs and not protecting us on 9/11! Not that Iran could prevent Kristol's pet attack the way 9/11 could likely have been prevented if terrorism had been a Bush priority before the fact. Anyway, as we now know Al Qaeda is stronger than any time since we overthrew the Taliban, we'll have lots of nice excuses to attack people who had no ties whatsoever to 9/11.
Iraq has proven that there are no real consequences for an administration who lies the country into war. There are no repercussions for the pundits who cheerled us into it and who never look back to examine how they were wrong. They got their war and that's all that matters. Now they're confident they'll get their next one, and the news outlets still treat them as "experts." They may be wrong all the time, but they are experts on getting their way, and they'll be blaming the left on every talk show as they go. Is the only way to get these nuts held accountable, to catch them in an Imus-esque racist moment? That hasn't gotten Rush or Coulter in any real trouble has it? Why are these people allowed to be wrong all the time and never called on it and still invited onto TV to hype the next war and attack those who question their clearly questionable wisdom?