The Kudzu Files

William Kristol

I caught part of an interview on NPR's Fresh Air today with William Kristol, and found myself, while not exactly in agreement with Kristol, at least conceding that he was making good points. He was discussing his continuing support of George Bush, while at the same time expressing deep frustration with Bush's policies and wondering whether they're as incompetent as they seem. He gave, I thought, a good defense of his position - that overall, he still was more in agreement with Bush policies than with Kerry; that he still agreed with the decision to go into Iraq, although the implementation of the policy has been flawed; that the alternative of liberals to the removal of Saddam Hussein seems to be leaving Saddam in place. I would dispute that last point - I think the debate was over how and when, but he also made the arguable point that keeping 150,000 US troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for a couple of years while waiting for Saddam's government to collapse, wouldn't have been tolerated by either Arabs or Americans. I think of it more this way - although many, many US conservatives despised Bill Clinton, they didn't advocate removing him by force. Why? Because that sort of action would have had ramifications far worse than leaving Clinton in power. I'm not suggesting that there's an equivalency between Saddam and Clinton, only that direct, unilateral military force isn't always the best way to handle things. But that's really beside the point now, since Hussein is gone and we're there. My point is/was, that Kristol was making sense, even if I wasn't ready to sign on. He even gave John Kerry credit for running a responsible campaign in the midst of Bush's stubbornness and stumbling policies. And then he blew it. He contended that the issue of whether the Bush administration misled us by claiming Iraq had nuclear weapons, or could very soon, was not relevant, because most Americans wanted Saddam out of power because of his potential for destabilizing the region, not because he was an immediate threat to the United States. But that's exactly what the general public reacted to. You still see it in letters to the editor of papers throughout the country. "We had to fight them there so we wouldn't be fighting them here"; "Do liberals want another 9/11?". You simply can't build a case that the US populace would have supported spending $125 billion dollars and the lives of nearly a thousand US troops to keep Saddam from destabilizing the United Arab Emirates. No, we didn't like Saddam. But what made us really dislike him, to the point of supporting sending US troops to invade a sovereign nation, was the claims by the administration that Saddam was an imminent physical threat to the continental United States. And pretending otherwise is being as stubborn as Kristol accused the Bush administration of being with the situation in Iraq.