....naaah.

If you read this Weblog - and I don't know why anyone does, honestly, since I just use it to rant - you've probably noticed a thread that runs through much of my complaints about today's political debates and the conservative positions on them. If you pay attention, it is exceedingly obvious that the farthest right-wing conservatives advocate things like tax cuts for the wealthy and invading Iraq for reasons that are far, far different than the ones they state in public. The problem is that the conservatives know the public won't support tax cuts to protect the wealthy and defund the government, just as the public would not support invading Iraq to remake the Middle East in the name of a Pax Americana.

So, instead, we get reasons like "stimulating the economy" and "giving back the surplus" and "weapons of mass destruction" and "Iraq aids terrorists" that are supported by no evidence whatsoever. We get these reasons because the public will support them, and the American news media, cowed after two decades of ridiculous slurs about being "liberally biased," refuses to come out and say that the evidence is not true.

(For some of the past references on here, see GOP saying what it doesn't mean and, particularly, Bush Administration lies, written three months ago.)

Now, at the time, good folks like Sean disagreed that this might be the case, and I respect that opinion. But now that we've been in Iraq for four months and have yet to find a single piece of evidence to justify any of the causes for war, the conservatives are now backing me up. In the Wall Street Journal's opinion journal, Steven Den Beste now says that the US and British governments had to lie to us to get us to go to war because we wouldn't support the real reasons:

In fact, the real reason we went into Iraq was precisely to "nation build": to create a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation. To create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy and successful and not ruled by corrupt monarchs or brutal dictators. This would demonstrate to the other people in the Arab and Muslim worlds that they can succeed, but only if they abandon those political, cultural and religious chains that are holding them back.

We are not doing this out of altruism. We are not trying to give them a liberalized Western democracy because we're evangelistic liberal democrats (with both liberal and democrat taking historical meanings). We are bringing reform to Iraq out of narrow self-interest. We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us.

So why did George W. Bush and Tony Blair, in making the case for war, put so much emphasis on U.N. resolutions and weapons of mass destruction? Honesty and plain speaking are not virtues for politicians and diplomats. If either Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair had said what I did, it would have hit the fan big-time. Making clear a year ago that this was our true agenda would have virtually guaranteed that it would fail. Among other things, it would have caused all of the brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs in the region to unite with Saddam against us, and would have made the invasion impossible. But now the die is cast, and said brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs no longer have the ability to stop the future.

Judge now that I spoke truthfully to you: they knew you would not support the real reasons for war, so they made up reasons you would support, and now they're freely admitting as much. In fact, they're all but blaming you for forcing them to make up reasons so they could get the war on.

I don't know that I have ever been so pessimistic about the possibility that the United States will survive as a nation.