Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Andrew Come Lately

One of Andrew Sullivan's favorite little games - and he's been doing it his entire career as a propagandist - is to suddenly "discover" an issue, pretend he was the first one to have thought of it, wrap himself in his new "contrarian" clothing, blast his mythical opposition for not having discussed the issue previously, use at as evidence for his moral/intellectual/sexual superiority, and do a total 180 degree turn from his prior position while pretending he hadn't.

I see via Tbogg that he's doing it again. He's now wondering:

Two things spring to mind: why weren't forces directed to secure all possible WMD sites immediately? And why were troops not sent to secure Saddam's conventional weapon sites immediately? The Baathist resistance is now fueled primarily by those weapons. The fate of WMDs is unsure - a critical reason for the war in the first place. Did Rumsfeld even think for a second about these post-war exigencies? Why were these objectives not included in the original war-plan as a whole?


Of course, I and everyone else with a brain, in the midst of accusations of being traitors, or of being Bush-haters, or of wanting the war to go badly, have been raising these issues on an almost daily basis since this little adventure began. (slight exaggeration there, perhaps, but nonetheless).