Political Observer.
Feb 06, 2026
Editor: The regular reader of @NYT recalls the acent of David Brooks to the New York Times cadre of Zionist apologists, via his war mongering ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’! But who can forget the New York Times’ Bret Stephens toxic essay March 21,2023 ? The Final paragraphs of Stephens war mongering chatter is instructive of the perpetual mendacity of the Straussian!
Bret Stephens
20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War
March 21, 2023
…
Then there was the argument that we could have contained Hussein indefinitely through sanctions and other means. Maybe in theory, but not in practice. The human misery caused by the sanctions against Iraq had become a fervent global cause by the late 1990s. They were internationally unsustainable. They were also easily flouted for the regime’s benefit, as the U.N.’s oil-for-food scandal laid bare.
Ultimately, the choice for the United States and our allies in early 2003 wasn’t invasion or containment. It was invasion or, over time, the quasi-rehabilitation of Hussein’s Iraq. This was a Hussein that, as the Duelfer report on Iraq’s W.M.D. noted in 2004, “wanted to recreate Iraq’s W.M.D. capability — which was essentially destroyed after 1991 — after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized.”
Finally, there is the argument that George W. Bush and his administration lied about the intelligence. I think they sincerely believed the (mis)judgments of the C.I.A., which, as the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report concluded, sincerely believed in them itself. “The intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the report noted. But it “was what they believed.” The consequences of this confusion are dangerous.
Critics of the war now make the point that the intelligence fiasco wrecked America’s credibility. It’s true. But no less damaging was the never-ending “Bush lied” charge that, 10 years later, morphed into the “Obama lied” charge when it came to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria or the suggestion that President Biden is lying about last year’s sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. One conspiracy theory tends to beget another, in ways that are destructive to all sides.
Readers will want to know whether, knowing what I know now, I would still have supported the decision to invade. Not for the reasons givenErnst Jünger at the time. Not in the way we did it. But on the baseline question of whether Iraq, the Middle East and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant, my answer remains yes.
Editor: Mr. Stephens is the etiolated version of Ernst Jünger? Thomas R. Nevin book provides vauable insights into Ernst Jünger!
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