Sullivan Pulls A Bush

From Andrew Sullivan.com

Josh Marshall has written an engaging and artful essay about the notion of an American empire for the liberal New Yorker magazine. I read it yesterday and then re-read it. Josh manages to write about the Clinton era "soft-imperialism" and the Bush era "hard imperialism" with nary a mention of a certain even that occurred on September 11, 2001. Maybe I missed something. I doubt if his editors noticed the lacuna. Why should they? For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen. Everything the Bush administration has tried to do in foreign policy is perverse, neocon imperialism - despite the fact that Bush ran as less interventionist than Al Gore in 2000. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that this administration's hard line against terror-sponsoring regimes and those developing WMDs was not some ideological plot - but a reaction to events.

Never mind that Iraq didn't have WMD's, wasn't even close, had very limited ties to Al Qeada, no connection with 9-11 or the War on Terror. It was a reaction to events and that is all you need to know. Unless you have forgotten.