Just a quick rewrite

ONE MORE thought about our smart president’s speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier this week. While he was chiding critics on these shores for not being intelligent enough when it comes to his deal with Teheran, and how they should be more responsible with national security ( for example, by allowing Iran to get the Bomb in the next decade?) the president noted that his critics sounded a lot like those nasty war hawks from the early 2000s. You know, “the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq,” as the president put it.

Somebody once said if a Washington, D. C. politician says something three times, and it’s published, then it becomes a fact. But here in Arkansas, and in the rest of flyover country, nonsense is nonsense no matter how many times it’s repeated. Quick to go to war in Iraq? After the attacks in this country of September 11, 2001, this country decided that history hadn’t ended after all, and got serious about taking on security threats. Including the one in Iraq, a country that had spent a decade dodging United Nations’ weapons inspectors. If memory, archives, Google and history books serve, the world debated what to do with Iraq throughout, oh, about the entire year of 2002. Congress argued, the UN passed its resolutions, spies made promises and assumptions, and then there were presentations and debates and more arguing. Politicians pounded tables. Diplomats hedged. Saddam Hussein dodged and weaved. Diplomacy failed. Weapons inspectors pulled out of Iraq the following year. And the invasion of Iraq didn’t start until March of 2003. That’s some rush to war. Critics of the Iraq War during the last Bush administration have their points, no doubt. Especially in hindsight. But a rush to war?

If that was a rush to war, what would giving Saddam Hussein all the time he needed to comply with international demands look like?