Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman’s latest piece, “The Conservative Crack-up,” is an interesting read but it could use a bit more fact. Take, for example, his first line that it was “the ‘neocons’ who convinced him to go to war there [in Iraq]” as if no others supported the president’s action. Fineman, of course, isn’t the first to airbrush the historical record as Robert Kagan explained in this Washington Post piece, “On Iraq, Short Memories.”
If you read even respectable journals these days…you would think that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq…. That’s not the way I recall it. I recall support for removing Saddam Hussein by force being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives.
