Bush keeps revising war justification

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.

Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive "struggle between good and evil."

Republicans seized on North Korea's reported nuclear test last week as further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond Iraq.

Bush's changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president's strongest suit politically.

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I wrote this in Real Art comments yesterday:

I often wonder if Bush's advisors are smarter than we give them credit for, if they're playing some entirely different game, with lots of misdirection. Do you ever wonder why we really invaded Iraq? Surely not for WMD, which they must have known weren't there. Surely not to get access to Iraq's oil reserves because we have fairly safe and stable access in other countries. And surely not to "spread democracy" because that's just fucking stupid on its face.

I would add to that comment that we are surely not there to fight terrorism, either: in fact, the war is doing precisely the opposite; it's creating terrorism, and we know that now for sure. My own bet continues to be on the "control the spigot" theory, that the idea is to transmute our awsome military power into massive economic leverage by exercising hegemony over the Middle East from huge bases in Iraq, making all other industrial powers kiss the US imperial ring in order to get cheap and plentiful oil. But who really knows? Bush certainly isn't saying, and it's very possible that he actually believes his own bullshit, but someone working in the White House must know, and, ultimately, your guess is as good as mine about what they're really up to.

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