For the Arab world, 2005 may be remembered as the year of the election. Today, Palestinians will choose a new president. Three weeks later, Iraqis will elect a national assembly. This will be only the beginning. Palestinians will go to the polls no fewer than three more times before the year is out, to elect municipal councils, a new legislative body and new leadership within Fatah, the dominant political party. ...
From February through April, Saudi Arabia will hold municipal elections throughout the kingdom, a landmark step of popular participation for an absolutist regime that has imprisoned academics merely for advocating constitutional monarchy.
This spring, Lebanon will hold parliamentary elections. These are nothing new, but for the first time, a multiethnic opposition to the Syrian puppet regime might actually win a significant share.
Late in the year, Egypt will hold parliamentary elections, the first step toward choosing a president. …

WMD vs. Draining the Swamps
When Bush charged Saddam Hussein with refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, he was relying in good faith on what the CIA—and every other intelligence agency in the world—assured him was the case. He was also acting in good faith when he warned that Saddam might put such weapons into the hands of terrorists, and when he then invoked this danger in an advance justification of the new policy of preemption ("If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long").
But there would be a heavy price to pay for placing so much stress on the issue of WMD. Not only did the failure to find them severely injure the case for invading Iraq; perhaps even more injurious was that the emphasis on WMD obscured the long-range strategic rationale for the invasion. For while the immediate objective was indeed to disarm Saddam Hussein, the larger one was to press on with "draining the swamps"—whether created by religious despots, as in Afghanistan, or by secular tyrants, as in Iraq—that were in Bush’s view the breeding-grounds of terrorism in the greater Middle East. Nor could those swamps be drained only by strong-arming the regimes under which they had been festering. It was also necessary in this view to replace these regimes with elected governments that would work to fulfill the hopes of "the peoples of the Islamic nations [who] who want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation."
All this pretty much disappeared from the debate over Iraq in the months before the invasion. Nevertheless, it gradually sank in among the realists that they had been wrong in dismissing Afghanistan as a one-shot affair, and that disarming Saddam was not the be-all or the end-all of the invasion of Iraq. Hard though it was for them, they finally had to face up to the incredible fact that Bush had not just been making rhetorical noises when he said that his ultimate strategic aim was to push all the states in the greater Middle East—every last one of them—toward democracy.
Worse yet, there was no dissuading him by argument, not even when close advisers of his father like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker were telling him that it was a mistake to invade Iraq. Brainwashed (as the realists along with many others had concluded) by the neoconservative ideologues who had wormed their way into his mind, he refused to recognize that by far the most important obstacle to solving all our problems in the Middle East was not Saddam Hussein but Ariel Sharon. And he remained calmly impervious to the objection that pursuing his new doctrine of democratization would destabilize the region (maddeningly, he even responded that this was exactly what he wanted to do) and would also increase rather than lessen the danger of terrorism.
An interesting wrinkle in the story of the realist offensive against the Bush Doctrine is that it did not enlist the services of Henry Kissinger, the universally acknowledged leader of that school.
The War Against World War IV- Norman Podhoretz

Originally posted by B. Michael White:


1. Bush and/or the intelligence agencies lied about the WMD and no longer care about keeping the facade with the American people post election OR:

Originally posted by B. Michael White:
U.S. calls off fruitless search for weapons

So does this mean that it is also official that our reason for invading Iraq REALLY WAS just a big lie?