on how the Bush Administration's shifting rationale for war and other communications failures help turn the tide against the war in Iraq:
When we didn't find the WMD in the quantities the intel had indicated would be there, the administration began talking up democracy-promotion as the righteous cause for which we were fighting. No meaningful effort was made to solidify Saddam's record as a jihadist facilitator. I started warning that this would be a big problem before the 2004 election ..In an earlier post McCarthy wrote:
After winning re-election, the administration took the tack that it was "looking forward rather than back." Feeling itself burned on the WMD front, the administration decided it was a political loser to revisit the multi-layered rationale for the Iraq invasion. Thus it talked about democracy-promotion and refused to engage with critics who assiduously discredited the war as illegitimate. This was a triple-disaster in that (a) Americans don't care whether Iraq becomes a democracy, (b) since building democracy in an Islamic society is, to put it mildly, difficult, we were sure to suffer set-backs which would enrage the public while occasional successes (like elections) would do little to enthuse the public, and (c) without a coherent tie-in between Iraq operations and the suppression of jihadist terror (which Americans do care about), public support for the war was bound to plummet -- and without public support, the forces on the Left that want the U.S. to lose the war would have an increasingly strong hand.
For years, I've been beating the seemingly dead horse that the reason we deposed Saddam was to eliminate a national security threat not to establish Iraqi democracy; that democracy-promotion is a dangerously counterproductive distraction; and that the Bush administration has made a galactic blunder by failing to champion the war-on-terror rationale for invading Iraq ..