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"If Timothy McVeigh had driven 500 miles north to Canada rather than 500 miles south to Oklahoma, no one would have thought Canada would have the right to invade and remake our country because it's produced some bad people."It's easy to forget, though, that fairly few people would have bought that rationale in the first place, and so neither the Afghanistan nor the Iraq War were sold on the strength of neoconservative, culture-changing arguments. Afghanistan was a limited military response meant to destroy al Qaeda and rip apart the skeletal state that harbored them. Similarly, Iraq was supposedly a war of (preemptive_ self-defense: Iraq, we were told, had weapons of mass destruction that will be passed onto terrorists, delivered through unmanned drones, used to gain control of all the world's oil, and so on. It's testament to how effective the Bush administration has been at reframing the argument that you rarely see this speech referenced, but it probably best encapsulates the way the Iraq War was sold:
If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly-enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.Some citizens wonder: After 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now?There is a reason. We have experienced the horror of September 11. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing -- in fact they would be eager -- to use a biological, or chemical, or a nuclear weapon.Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.As that rationale proved itself to be, uh, bullshit, this idealistic "domino theory" idea took over, and now it was a war meant to rid the Middle East of tyranny and autocracy and seed the region with pluralistic liberal democracies. But if the Iraq War had been sold as a nation building endeavor, it never would have been waged. Which is why the Bush administration spent a lot of time lying, and making transparently false arguments about the direct threat imposed by Saddam Hussein.
