Cirincione

by tristero

He rarely gets on the Tube, and chances are you haven’t heard of him, but Joe Cirincione is one of the finest liberal voices out there. I’ve been reading him since sometime in late ’02/early ’03 when he was authoring studies for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the folks who got WMD and the outcome of the Bush/Iraq war exactly right, who proposed a viable alternative to invasion to contain Saddam (coercive inspections) and who were completely ignored or dismissed, even by highly respected liberal bloggers.

In this post for Huffington, he praises Maddow’s assertive discussions with former Bush officials of the cooked WMD intelligence. Towards the end, he concludes:

Rachel Maddow, to her credit, refuses to let these officials off the hook. She says on her show September 2, that we cannot “look back at the rational for the Iraq war now and say, “well, none of those reasons for the war turned out to be true but what does that matter?”

She is right. Policy matters. Bad policy leads to seriously bad consequences.

Why are we still threatened by Al Qaeda? Because we diverted troops from capturing Osama bin Ladin to overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Why are we trapped in a losing war in Afghanistan? Because we decided invading Iraq was more important than stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Why do we have a skyrocketing deficit? In part, because we will spend $1 trillion on the war in Iraq.

Why are we threatened by nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea? Because we shunned effective means to shut down those programs when they were a fraction of their current size in the vain hope that we could overthrow those regimes as we had Iraq’s.

Exactly, succinctly right.