Fans of liberty will find plenty to dispute in Michael Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism (Harper Collins, 2007).
The former Bush speechwriter and policy adviser is one of the more vocal advocates of a “big-government conservatism,” though he doesn’t acknowledge the proposition that all of the social justice mandates he favors necessarily lead to an overly powerful and intrusive government.
Despite the book’s flaws, Gerson offers a good rebuttal to the “Bush lied, people died” theory of the Iraq War.
Was the invasion of Iraq justified? I can only say that the evidence on weapons of mass destruction seemed very strong ? far more conclusive than any of the fragmentary warnings before 9/11. I had no evidence that my colleagues had lied to me, or to one another. And it would have made little sense to lie about such matters, since the truth would be dramatically revealed to everyone in just a few months. The views we held about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were not a deception; they were an assumption. And that assumption was shared not only by George Tenet and Colin Powell, but by Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, and by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, and by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Saddam Hussein had been guilty in the past. He acted guilty in the present. And the president was not prepared to tolerate the dangerous uncertainty he cultivated. Given what we knew, and thought we knew, ignoring that uncertainty would have been a betrayal of the president’s most basic constitutional responsibility to protect the American people.
The pre-war debate did not generally focus on the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but on the most prudent method to deal with them. And here the president took a middle-ground approach. He rejected the vice president’s counsel of a military operation without returning to the United Nations. But he also was not willing to return to the Clinton strategy of dire warnings, limited strikes ? and then further Iraqi violations that began the cycle all over again. So he took the approach urged by Secretary Powell and Prime Minister Blair: a new UN resolution, and a final chance for Saddam Hussein to comply. This left the final decision for war in the hands of Saddam himself.
