The Foreign Standard

The now defunct Weekly Standard was the right's flagship publication for an interventionist foreign policy.

In other places it has been argued that the Standard is most responsible for drumming up 'war fever' against Saddam.

They certainly had a lot of influence in Washington. The Neo-Cons in the White House had the president's ear becuase after 9/11 they were the only one's with a coherent plan. The old foreign policy pros, Baker, Scowcroft, etc etc, argued for containment and maintaining stability in the Middle East.

The Neo-Cons argued the opposite, calling for the destabilization of the Middle East. Why not destabilize a region full of secular dictators, kleptocrats, and religious whack-jobs?  Recall that after the liberation of Iraq a civilian defense policy review board chaired by Neocon extraordinaire Richard Pearl called for the seizure of Saudi Arabia's oil fields.

While the liberation of Iraq was certainly a Neoconservative project they were not the only one's calling for it. We're thinking of centrist 'new age' squishes like Tom Freidman here in the US and Michael Ignatief, the Canadian version of Tom Freidman.

We agreed and agree with all of the above.

We're trying to remember our mindset in the days after 9/11. We recall a vague sense that the Middle East had to be changed through war. In the spring of 2003 it seemed that was happening, no? Saddam had been toppled. Bush and Blair had just sidelined Yasser Arafat. It seemed to us that the next target was the Iranian Mullahs, who could be removed through some sort of internal revolution, dare we call it a 'Persian Spring'?

We thought that by liberating Iraq, the United States could wage cultural and ideological war from the heart of the Middle East. Heh, in the days following the 'Arab Spring' Kristol and company tried to take credit for the movement. In 2011 we understood that was Beltway crap. They didn't.

Which is one of the reasons why the Weekly Standard is no more.