Say It Ain't So Already

“Liberal” WaPo Columnist Didn’t Learn From The Mistakes He Made in Run-Up to the Iraq War

February 7, 2012 at 4:57 PM Leave a comment

In March of 2008, the “liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was asked to write about the mistakes he made in supporting the invasion of Iraq:

Photo: The Washington Post

In the following days, as the horror started to be airbrushed—no more bodies plummeting to the sidewalk—the anthrax letters started to come, some to people I knew. And I thought, No, I’m not going to sit here passively and wait for it to happen. I wanted to go to “them,” whoever “they” were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of “them” was Saddam Hussein. He had messed around with anthrax; he had twice started wars in the region (Iran and Kuwait); he had massacred the Kurds and the Shiites; used chemical weapons (no doubt about that); had had a nuclear weapons program (also no doubt about that); and was violating U.N. resolution after resolution (absolutely no doubt about that, either). Saddam was a sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.

That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war in Iraq. It did not take me all that long, however, to have second thoughts—and I expressed them in my column. It was clear that Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden, that Iraqi intelligence had not met with Mohammed Atta in Prague, and that while Iraq once had a nuclear weapons program, it no longer did. That left chemical and biological weapons, and neither represented much of a threat.

[...]

I was not only unprepared for the revelation that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever, but—even more stunning—that such seasoned hands as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, to name just three veterans of past presidencies, would prove so cosmically incompetent.

In his column today, Cohen repeats the same mistakes:  America’s red lines in the sand on Iran:  “The ultimate remedy is Iranian regime change. … This looming crisis is not only about Israel. It’s about America, too.”

The “liberal” media is jumping on the war bandwagon.  Last night Chris Matthews on MSNBC said, If you can’t think of anything worse than Iran with a nuclear weapon, “Strike ‘em.”

Entry filed under: The "Liberal Media", Wars. Tags: columnist richard cohen, liberal washington post.