Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about:

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?

Huh. A collaborative effort with the people of Iraq? Friedman goes on:

But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: "No" and "Maybe, sort of, we'll see."

Hmm.

Others remember a different Tom Friedman, interviewed by Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.

"Now that the war is over," Rose began his question--a conclusion widely jumped to in the early days of the war. When asked if invading Iraq was worth it, Friedman responded that it was "unquestionably worth doing."

The war, back then, was an attack on the "terrorist bubble," which in Friedman's mind meant that "we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick... and there was only one way to do it."

He went on:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, suck. On. This." That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

The house-to-house, "suck on this" democracy campaign. That's how it's normally done.

I guess one great thing about being a Times columnist is that you not only  get to write about the present--you can also re-write your own past.

When it comes to the rationale for the entire war, things get a bit fuzzy. Like we pointed out recently about CBS Evening News, the main driver of the invasion--the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--is reduced to something like a footnote:

The premise was contested from the start, a new doctrine of preemptive war tailored to an era in which stateless militants could batter the once-distant United States with the everyday tools of modern society--commercial jets as missiles, cellphones as triggers, trucks as bombs.

The neoconservatives at the Pentagon and in the West Wing argued that the invasion of Iraq was necessary. Hussein, the longtime U.S. nemesis who once tried to kill then-President Bush's father, was openly encouraging Palestinian militancy at a time when Hamas was blowing up cafes and pizzerias in Jerusalem. A model of democracy in the Middle East--imposed by the U.S. military--would inspire change in its neighbors or frighten them into reform.

Besides, Hussein had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to put down a Shiite rebellion that the United States failed to support after pledging to do so--a broken promise that helped fill the mass graves of Hilla, south of Baghdad. And he supposedly had an arsenal of some of the world’s nastiest weapons that had to be found and destroyed before they ended up with Al-Qaeda.

In this bizarre re-telling, Saddam Hussein's support for Hamas and a plot to kill George H. W. Bush seem to matter more than the bogus stories about Iraq's WMDs. Perhaps all you can say about this is that it makes a certain kind of sense for the U.S. government and elite media to want people to forget the falsehoods that launched the war.

Greenwald called it "surprisingly good," which is right. But one thing about the piece really bothered me--how it dealt with the death of Bacevich's son in Iraq. Reporter Rick Hampson tells that story via the classroom:

The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was an Army officer there. They did not know that the day before he had been killed there.

That awful irony--a son follows his father into the military and dies in a war the father fought to end--has helped make Bacevich one of the most prominent and credible critics of U.S. foreign policy.

I doubt that USA Today really means to say that the death of Bacevich's son "helped" make Bacevich's critique more "credible," but that's certainly what comes across here. As a politically conservative critic of Clinton, Bush and now Obama policies, one would hope that his record speaks for itself.

Bacevich doesn't speak publicly much about his son's death--I recall that from an interview he did with Bill Moyers in 2008. And Bacevich says much the same later on in the USA Today article:

Bacevich says his son's loss does not affect his analysis and should not affect how it is received. "I've never said, 'You need to listen to me because my son died in Iraq.'"

Again, this is one troubling aspect to an otherwise interesting piece about an important voice in our national debate. But that passage was a little off.

Not surprisingly, Hussein comes off as paranoid, incompetent and so on.  Gordon begins the story noting that Hussein was troubled by the Iran/Contra story, interpreting the U.S. deal with his Iranian enemies as some sort of "conspiracy against Iraq."

Gordon calmly explains, free of a conspiratorial mind-set, that Iran/Contra was just an operation "to open a private channel to the new leadership in Tehran and to generate secret profits that could be sent to Nicaraguan rebels. " You know, the way any superpower funnels support to a terrorist group. No big deal.

Gordon explains later that the Iraqis

could not understand why the Reagan administration had taken military action against Libya in 1986 but was reaching out to Iran, since, Mr. Hussein said, Iran "plays a greater role in terrorism."

"I am trying to understand exactly what happened here," he said.

Hussein saw such conspiracies everywhere:

But Mr. Hussein would not be moved from his conspiratorial view. He mentioned the arms sales again in his fateful meeting on July 25, 1990, with April Glaspie, the American ambassador in Baghdad, when he again misread Washington and assumed it would stand aside when his army invaded Kuwait a week later.

The Glaspie meeting with Hussein has been pretty well-known for years. As FAIR pointed out in 1991, Glaspie's apparent message to Hussein was that the United States would not actively object to Iraq invading Kuwait.

One of the WikiLeaks cables that was recently released covered that meeting. And from that account, it's not clear that Saddam Hussein misread anything. As Harvard professor Stephen Walt wrote back when the cable was released:

a careful reading of the cable suggests that Saddam could have easily interpreted Glaspie's conversation, along with other statements by U.S. officials, as a sign that the United States was not strongly committed to protecting Kuwait.

After Hussein rattled off his various grievances, what did Glaspie say? From Walt:

Her very first point in response is to thank him for the opportunity to discuss these matters directly, and she then says that "President Bush, too, wants friendship." Her next point is to tell Saddam that "the President had instructed her to broaden and deepen our relations with Iraq," and she reminds Saddam that though "some circles" might oppose that policy, "the U.S. administration is instructed by the President." And then she adds that "what is important is that the President has very recently reaffirmed his desire for a better relationship" and he has shown that desire by opposing some sanctions bills.

The meeting eventually turned to Iraq's escalating crisis with Kuwait:

According to the cable, she asks: "Is it not reasonable for the U.S. to ask, in a spirit of friendship, not confrontation, the simple question: What are your intentions?"

Saddam says it is a reasonable question, and he acknowledges that this is even our "duty" as a superpower. But he quickly returns to his list of grievances, and says he's tried everything to resolve his problem with Kuwait.  He subsequently leaves the room to take a phone call, and returns with the encouraging news (from Egyptian President Mubarak), that the Kuwaitis have agreed to further negotiations.  The meeting then ends on a friendly note, but when Saddam raises the question of his border dispute with Kuwait, Glaspie responds that "she had served in Kuwait 20 years before; then as now, we took no position on these Arab affairs."

The conspiracy-minded Hussein could also have "misread" the Washington Post (7/26/90), which reported right after the Glaspie meeting and six days before Iraq's invasion that administration officials were saying that "an Iraqi attack on Kuwait would not draw a U.S. military response." In Hussein's twisted mind, apparently, that meant that if he attacked Kuwait, the U.S. would not respond militarily.