[M]any of us who initially crossed party lines to support the Iraq war have been turned against it not by the increasing dangers and difficulties of the mission, but rather by this administration's seemingly endless willingness -- desire, even -- to substitute simple-minded PR nonsense for serious talk about serious matters. If Karl Rove and Co. manage to lose this election -- and hard as it is to believe, they well may -- their consistent deceptiveness on issues of grave national importance will surely be one of the major reasons why. And they'll have no one but themselves to blame.
I've opposed the invasion of Iraq from day one. For what it's worth, I am no peacemonger. I supported Bush's invasion of Afghanistan, Clinton's war in the Balkans, and the first Bush's Gulf War. Sometimes being able to kick ass obligates you to do so. And from that standpoint, the invasion of Iraq made no sense to me. Since the middle of 2002 when the invasion was first broached publicly, there has been a tremendous amount of discussion on-line and off whether it was the right thing to do. But O'Toole makes an excellent point: whatever discussion we've been having has been made harder by the administration's relentless desire to control the debate. They have sought to define the terms of discussion so as to make the outcome - favorable to them - inevitable. So individuals have been left on their own to try to dig the truth out of the mass of data out there, and then shape that information into some kind of coherent whole in order to evaluate the situation. One of those truths is that the public often will leave decisions about war and peace to the executive branch. Ironically, it's Bush's desire to control the information flow that has poisoned that trust and may ultimately lead to his electoral defeat and the abandonment of his policy in Iraq.
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