’)According to Jeff Jarvis, the tragedy of the Downing Street memo isn’t that George Bush and his administration selectively edited data in order to plunge America into war and sacrifice the lives of 1,700 members of the military. No, sir, in the Park Avenue chardonnay-sipping world of “liberalism” that Jeff Jarvis inhabits – the one in which he gets invited to all the fun get togethers with his conservative pals because he’s one of the “reasonable” liberals, the big tragedy of the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq war is… public relations.
Oh, man. What a mess. Jarvis complains that Bush did a bad job of selling the war both before and after the fact.
Before the war, Jarvis says Bush should have cited:
a) the need to clean up Daddy’s mess and remove a tyrant
b) the need to establish a foothold for democracy in the middle East
c) and fight the terrorists over there instead of over here.
Problem is, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish all three at once. How do you provide a foothold for democracy when you’re trying to draw terrorists from all over the middle East into that same place?
Jarvis conveniently forgets that the runup to the invasion of Iraq came hard on the heels of 9-11. Bush couldn’t very well sell the invasion by telling the American public: “Never mind Osama. We’re going to pursue my crackpot colleagues vague ambitions for global hegemony.”
Yeah, that would have gone over. Big! [eyeroll]