Matt, people ask me, how could you have ever supported this war? It was a crazy time in American life. Today, for example, we’re around the house listening to Love is Dead, the 1996 classic from The Mr. T Experience, pop-punk favorites from my youth. The heart and soul of the Experience, of course, is Dr. Frank. Doctor Frank has a blog. Back in the day, it was full of posts like this:

It’s too bad he hasn’t been giving speeches like this all along, but it’s welcome nonetheless. After weeks of “leaks” and trial balloons about proposed scenarios for post-Saddam Iraq, the administration seems to have, at last, committed itself to the pro-democracy, neo-con program, or at least something along those lines. At the very least, any further waffling, wobbling, or backtracking, any hint that our efforts at Liberation will be less than sincere or thorough, any nod to the stability-at-all-costs mantra of Foggy Bottom and the GHWB alumni, can now be criticized fairly powerfully with a playback of the President’s own words.

You have to understand, this isn’t a rightwing propagandist blogging here. It’s a freaking punk rock star. And, yes, he concludes with a parenthetical “Of course, in practical terms, the bluster-o-meter matters much less than the fact that the French attempt to wound the US by bringing down the Blair government appears to have failed.” Fuck France!

And, I suppose, in some sense invading another country for no reason at all is sort of the most punk rock thing ever. Uncritically accepting the statements of the nation’s political leaders, though, isn’t so punk. I should have listened to Green Day but everyone knows they sold out.

I got all excited because I thought Michael Ledeen was linking to an official announcement here:

I think the appeasers ought to have a candidate in the Republican primaries, and he’s their ideal standard-bearer. So far as I know, he never met a dictator he didn’t want to appease.

Turns out to just be some speculation. It’s worth considering the charges here. Appeasement, as we know, is bad because when tried vis-a-vis Adolf Hitler it didn’t succeed. Is it really so implausible that during Chuck Hagel’s term in the Senate, from 1996 to the present day, he feels the United States has not encountered any genuinely Hitleresque dictators on the world stage?

This, of course, is the perplexing thing about the Munich analogy. It’s made with a sort of eerie constancy, like the world is just chock-a-block with Hitlers. The salient fact about Hitler, however, and the world situation in the 1930s, is that it was unusual time and Hitler an unusual person. The suggestion that we should make recourse to strategies that, allegedly, would have, in retrospect, have been optimal for coping with Hitler as our regular basis for dealing with foreign leaders who don’t eagerly submit to American hegemonic aspirations is daft.

The All Wise Voices of Reason at The Washington Post editorial board poo-poo the Libby verdict and conclude with a sniff: “Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby’s conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq.”

Come now. That reads like a dispatch from, say, mid-2004 when there was a serious debate in this country about the Iraq War. From the vantage point of March 2007 what could we possibly learn that would change our minds about the Iraq War. We learned, years ago, that the WMD case was a mess. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea has gotten worse. Thousands of American soldiers are dead. Tens of thousands more are wounded, many of them seriously. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. And nothing has been accomplished. There was nothing left for the Libby conviction to possibly tell us about the war; the war debate ship left the port years ago.

Peter Baker in The Washington Post: “For an administration that [i.e. the Libby trial] has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger.” There’s much truth to this. The list of persons potentially facing criminal liability for actions undertaken at the behest of George W. Bush or on behalf of his administration is extremely long. Of course, in practice it’s exceedingly unlikely that Bush himself or, say, Donald Rumsfeld will ever face prosecution for war crimes they’ve ordered, but there’s at least a chance. And from the top various forms of criminality go all the way down and fan out throughout the agencies.

This, it always seemed to me, was one of the great unreported pretexts of the 2004 election. Team Bush was, substantially, fighting for its continued freedom. The mere fact of re-election, however, greatly shields them. Without a successor to try to put into the White House, there’s really very little impediment to the administration not only stonewalling at any turn, but simply handing out pardons whenever necessary. That’s how his dad did business and it worked.