Friday, January 30, 2009

A snippet

From that Vanity Fair Oral History:

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: What happened was the president made the point to the staff that, if America ever goes to war, we go to war because it’s the right thing to do regardless of the cost. That is a moral issue, and so we should not be talking to anybody about how much it may or may not cost; the whole issue is, do you or don’t you go? And if you go, you pay whatever the cost is to win. The day the president dismissed Larry and Secretary O’Neill, I remember he said to me that he noticed that morning that everybody in the Situation Room was sitting up a bit straighter.

This makes a lot of sense in what we've seen of Bush's worldview. In some ways it has its merits as an approach--but, to me, it would have to be one approach among several applied to the decision.

In any case, somewhere Larison is sardonically explaining why this is unremarkable as a phenomenon, noteworthy only because it took the usual ideologies of foreign policy a little further.

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