Scott Rosenberg on Iraq
Scott Rosenberg, who does a blog on blogs and such has an item on a NYT piece about how "the delay in [Dubya] communicating his views [on invading Iraq] to the American people was the result of simple P.R. planning." His concluding paragraph is:
There's just one little nagging problem here: The Iraq hawks keep telling us that the threat from Saddam Hussein is so urgent that an invasion cannot wait for U.N. inspectors, sanctions, more evidence of Saddam's possession of "weapons of mass destruction," or a good old congressional debate (though Bush is now grudgingly accepting that need). Time's a-wasting -- we must have "regime change" now. But, hey, we can delay everything for a whole month if that makes things more convenient for White House TV consultants, and for Bush's ranch schedule.
There are some interesting comments to the piece. One comments:
Sigh. Cheap shot. I don't think anyone has been saying that if we don't act within a month or two, that Saddam Hussein will attack us. Rather the urgency that has been expressed is of a more general nature - we've got to do something, "soon."
To which I would rebut something from Eric Alterman's blog:
The Vietnam historian David Kaiser made this interesting point on the H-Diplo list serve: "I think this is an interesting question but something new has emerged in the last 24 hours. The White House is trying to insist on a Congressional vote before the elections, partly in order to embarrass any Democrat who votes no, and also to avoid having to face a Democratic House and Senate. I will be quite surprised, however, if Congress allows itself to be stampeded along these lines. Incidentally, it’s interesting that Ari Fleischer yesterday insisted that the Congress should be willing to act BEFORE the UN Security Council does so - a reversal, I believe, of the sequence of events in 1990-91"
6:49:36 AM 
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