Of course we knew that this was the party line back in 1994, and it’s no longer the party line today. Striking, though, to hear the argument phrased so succinctly, knowledgeably, and clearly, and striking to hear the argument offered from then-Secretary Cheney:
Now that we’ve gone and done what Cheney argued against doing in 1994 (at Cheney’s urging eight years later), seeing our way out of the quagmire (Cheney’s word, not mine) has become our least bad option. How did Cheney take such a dramatic reversal of opinion? Like Lucius Aelius Sejanus in the court of Tiberius, he decided that aggrandizement of his own power was more important than anything else, and a little bit of hypocrisy was a small price to pay for guiding the hands of ultimate authority.
