9% approval for bombing Syria = suicide for Dems in 2014

[DaveT]

97. The whole WMD obsession

is absurd, an invention of the Bush Administration.

From 1945 until 2003, there was a national security consensus, supported whole heartedly by both parties, that deterrence was the best way to deal with the threat posed by Stalin, Mao and their successors. This was overthrown with no debate by the Bush Administration with the invasion of Iraq.

Most people see the criminality of the Bush Administration in its dishonest depiction of Iraq as a bristling arsenal of WMDs. But I think that it was even worse -- far worse -- that they succeeded utterly in the abandonment of deterrence as national policy. We turned Nuremburg on its head, and we adopted the philosophy of Tojo by not waiting while threats developed. Instead, we took pre-emptive action and we now have a standing policy of Attack First.

Now President Obama has inherited this moral abomination and idiotic strategy of starting wars to prevent potential threats from maturing into actuality. His rhetoric on this Syrian bullshit is firmly rooted in the Bush Doctrine of using America's allegedly infinite power to prevent the Syrian government from employing WMDs, explicitly citing the possibility that those weapons might someday be used against the USA.

This policy is insane and one of my many disappointments in Obama is that he has not repudiated the Attack First doctrine of George Walker Bush and the Project for a New American Century.