Yesterday, George Bush opened his speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) by saying:
I appreciate the chance to come and share some thoughts with the men and women of AEI. I admire AEI a lot -- I'm sure you know that. After all, I have been consistently borrowing some of your best people. More than 20 AEI scholars have worked in my administration. [...]
Thanks for trying to stay on the leading edge of thought, as well. It's really important that ideas be conceived, circulated and embraced.
Today, let's take a look at some of the leading edge of thought that was conceived, circulated and embraced by this administration, courtesy of the AEI, in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of, the war in Iraq:
- Whether Osama bin Laden was involved in Tuesday's terrorist assault remains to be seen. Yet if that proves to be so, it is extremely unlikely that he acted on his own. It is far more likely that he operated in conjunction with a state--the state with which the U.S. remains at war, namely Iraq. - 9/13/2001
- As in Afghanistan, there are large numbers of Iraqi people who will help us crush Saddam. - 10/15/2001
- If there's an emerging conventional wisdom uniting many of the pundits, military analysts, and former government officials who have taken to the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent weeks, it's that the United States can overthrow Saddam, but it will be messy and painful...But there's reason to believe that these predictions...are too pessimistic. For one thing, the United States can't bog down in protracted warfare in Baghdad unless a significant number of Iraqi troops are willing to fight us there. While newspaper leaks have featured sobering assessments of the number of U.S. troops needed for an Iraq war, such numbers can be deceiving. - 9/9/2002
- Instead of providing support for the terrorists, the Iraqi people would support allied forces, and create a model for the war against terrorism throughout the region: Free countries don't support terrorism. They fight it. - 2/21/2003
- And when we finally smash his evil regime suddenly those countries that doubt us will have their eyes opened. Meanwhile UN weapons inspectors are being seriously deceived. - 2/23/2003
- A hateful regime will be gone, and except for Saddam, French President Jacques Chirac and the media analysts, almost no one will have had the sky fall on the them. - 3/28/2003
- This was a war worth fighting. It ended quickly with few civilian casualties and with little damage to Iraq's cities, towns or infrastructure. It ended without the Arab world rising up against us, as the war's critics feared, without the quagmire they predicted, without the heavy losses in house-to-house fighting they warned us to expect. - 5/2/2003
- Also, I was really struck--because I know that many Americans think of Iraq as a brutally sectarian, ethnically-racially divided country. Certainly, there are latent suspicions, particularly among extremists of all parties--but the general ambience between Shia and Sunni, and between all of them and the Kurdish population, is remarkably positive. - 10/20/2003
- Eight American troops died in Baghdad, as fighting erupted between Coalition troops and followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. Hearing the news, Senator Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) declared Iraq to be "George Bush's Vietnam." Evening-news anchors question whether this weekend's violence marked the start of a Shii revolt. Quite the contrary...The sky is not falling. The decision to confront the Muqtada al-Sadr's challenge to rule-of-law and liberty will cause a short-term spike in violence, but lead to long-term improvement. - 4/6/2004
- The operational good news coming out of Iraq was the destruction of the Mahdi army that served the rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. - 10/24/2004
When you consider all of that deep thinking, isn't it comforting to know that another AEI luminary, Frederick Kagan, is the architect of the "new way forward" in Iraq?