Speaking of Liberal Hawk Revisionism…

Although this isn’t quite the Atrios link he’s craving (to put it mildly), Yglesias has a good point about the frequent indisinguishability of the arguments of “hawks” and (at least American) “liberal hawks” here:

This business, in short, short, about how maintaining security in an Iraq-sized country requires 450,000-550,000 troops, while it was something you could tell from the historical evidence, was ignored not just by Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, and George W. Bush, but by essentially all war proponents across the political spectrum. The reason is pretty clear — there would have been no war had its advocates made accurate forecasts about the levels of resources required. Among other things, someone might have noted that the US Army doesn’t have enough soldiers to deploy several hundred thousands troops to Iraq on anything resembling a sustained basis.

Similarly, we also wouldn’t have had a war if Iraq wasn’t portrayed as a grave security that had to be invaded right now, before the inspections which would prove Saddam had nothing at all were completed. While democracy was mentioned as a side benefit by most supporters and perhaps emphaszied more by liberal hawks, there’s no chance that a “Iraq poses no threat to American security argument but is a despotism almost as repressive as his American-allied neighbor so we need to invade now” argument was going to fly.