Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

While I've got SDB's latest foray into foreign policy on my mind, I note that he addresses the question of "Just where are all those WMDs of which we had such incontrovertible evidence before the war, anyway?" I find his answers, well, unconvincing and chilling.

To his credit, SDB doesn't engage in any weird "He moved 'em all to Syria" theory; he ends up conceding that, in all likelihood, the WMDs simply aren't there to be found. He even goes so far as to note that "One can do the right thing for the wrong reason". Well, the problem with that is that if one does the right thing for the wrong reason, then one tends to form a better impression of the reasoning process that went awry than is really warranted. And also, it hardly helps matters that the original rationale was founded very solidly on WMDs, and only after-the-fact is the revisionism starting up ("We did it because Saddam was/is a horribly heinous man", an assertion which, while true, immediately raises the question of just why we're not chomping at the bit to start going after all the other heinous people in power around the globe).

But then, SDB claims that this isn't even the case, because WMDs were never the real reason for going to war against Iraq in the first place, and neither, apparently, was Saddam's status as a heinous dictator. It was the whole neo-con Domino-theory, "Iraq-as-step-one-to-defeating-the-Arab-world" strategy all along. One wonders, then, if Islamic terrorism did not exist, but leaving all other things equal, if we'd have given a rat's ass about Saddam one way or the other in the first place.

And anyway, if this was our real reason the whole time, doesn't it say something that President Bush would never actually stand up and admit as much? If this was the real reason, why did we constantly have to read about Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz battling Colin Powell for GWB's soul? If the whole aim all along was to jump-start the Islamic world into the 21st century, why would the President of the United States never stand up and actually say, "Our goal here is to jump-start the Islamic world into the 21st century"?

SDB is pretty sure he knows where the United States should go, and he thinks it's the same place that the Administration thinks the United States should go. So isn't it a little odd that we only ever hear this theory as to where the United States should go not from the President, but from several of his underlings? Isn't SDB bothered at all by the fact that, even if this strategy is the "real reason we went to war" (which I'm far from convinced it is), that the Administration, when faced with the task of leadership on this strategy, opted for bullshitting the American people?