Wesley Clark: No Cause For War

Speaking truth in a place it's not often heard, General Wesley Clark appeared on Fox News yesterday to discuss whether, in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, there was any reason to invade Iraq. Fox is paying a lot of attention to this now to follow Team Bush's lead of admitting that the original rationale for war was bogus, while still insisting that there were many other good reasons to take Saddam out.

Here's Clark making it clear that Bush had already decided to invade and, to quote the Downing Street Memos, they were simply fixing the intelligence toward that end.

"If you read all of the writings about the [Bush] administration... The administration's greatest fears were, hey, what if the inspection program just keeps going and what if the inspectors don't find anything, then how are we going to justify the invasion? The administration kind of put the cart before the horse. They knew what remedy they wanted and they started down a process that was okay, but then they had to sort of jump ahead in order to justify the invasion."

Addressing that tired and dumb GOP question of "how long were we going to have to wait before taking action?" – as if the option of not taking action didn't exist-- Clark responded as follows:

"It might take some time. But, look, we've spent over 200 billion dollars there. We've had over 2,000 Americans die. We've got our armed forces deeply engaged. So what if we took two years if there was no threat to the United States that we couldn't deal with? If there wasn't anything he could do to hurt us, why not keep him in a vice?"

As always, you can see the whole video at Crooks and Liars.

The Bush administration will be driving hard to the hoop with their ends-justifies-the-means message as we head into 2006 and it's important that people like Clark keep speaking truth to that nonsense.