The Dangers of Revisionism

Glenn Greenwald turns Tom Friedman and some of the other usual suspects on a spit. Many links.

With a new administration ascending to power in a matter of weeks, witnessing Beltway denizens desperately scampering to re-write their role in the last eight years is nothing short of dizzying:

In 2006 and 2007, our political class was openly flirting with involuntary regret -- and even admissions of wrongdoing -- for its almost unanimous support for the attack on Iraq. That the war was a disaster was so undeniably clear that support for it was coming to be seen as a source of shame, and some of the most prominent supporters of the war were even resorting to outright falsehoods in order to pretend that they had opposed it from the start.

All of that is changing again. Even as Americans still overwhelmingly view the war itself as a mistake, we're back to the conventional wisdom among our political class that the invasion was not only justified and wise, but also noble in spirit and motive. The only problem was Bush's mismanagement of our benevolent quest to free the oppressed. [...]

I will state once again: Bush's War was not a mistake. It was a poorly planned and executed criminal act of aggression against a sovereign state that did nothing to us and posed no threat.

Freidman's ideological soulmate, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt, similarly editorializes today that what destroyed Bush's presidency was not the war itself or the fact that it was launched based on purely false pretenses and was illegitimate and wrong, but instead, was merely Bush's "mismanagement of the war."

The war itself was fine and right. Only its execution was flawed. We just need better war managers next time. That's the consensus that has re-emerged. And much of the palpable establishment excitement over the Obama administration is grounded not in the expectation that he will change this core mentality -- they clearly think, rightly or wrongly, that he won't -- but only that he'll execute and manage it more competently.

I don't think he will and pray he does not, but we better keep our eyes on the neocons. As much as we would like to see them all dead, they're not.