Greedy, Bloodthirsty Warmongers Are Not Patriots

Robert Dreyfuss posts a welcome reality check on President Obama's mission-not-accomplished speech on Iraq. The whole thing is excellent, but these paragraphs caught my eye:

The closest Obama came to a critique of war in Iraq was pure pablum: “Our nation has had vigorous debates about the Iraq War,” he said. “There are patriots who supported going to war, and patriots who opposed it.”

Patriots who supported going to war? Does he mean the deluded fools, the nonproliferation freaks and human rights extremists who joined Bush’s crusade? Does he mean the Zionist lobby tools who believed that eliminating Saddam Hussein was a useful step in protecting Israel? Does he mean the oil companies who couldn’t wait to get their clutches on Iraq’s vast pools of oil? Does he mean the defense contractors who relished the idea of making vast profits supporting the war? Or the right-wing ideologues who felt it necessary to slam Americas’s fist down in the Middle East to show the world who’s boss? Maybe these are “patriots” in Obama’s book, but not in mine.

Those who supported the war in Iraq, whether they were bloodthirsty neocons in Dick Cheney’s camp, useful idiots such as Peter Beinart of the New Republic, or iconoclastic weirdos such as Christopher Hitchens, weren’t patriots. They were regime change addicts, imperialists, and worse.

Once more, with feeling:

Those who supported the war in Iraq, whether they were bloodthirsty neocons in Dick Cheney’s camp, useful idiots such as Peter Beinart of the New Republic, or iconoclastic weirdos such as Christopher Hitchens, weren’t patriots. They were regime change addicts, imperialists, and worse.

If we learn nothing else from the Iraq clusterfuck, let it be that those who were right from the beginning - whether about an invasion or an economic crisis - are the only ones whose opinion deserves respect the next time around.

Because there is always a next time.

Read the whole thing.