{"id":748,"date":"2002-10-14T13:54:43","date_gmt":"2002-10-15T03:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/10\/14\/whos-gonna-swerve-first\/"},"modified":"2019-12-06T08:46:31","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T16:46:31","slug":"whos-gonna-swerve-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/10\/14\/whos-gonna-swerve-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Who&#8217;s gonna swerve first?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:15745,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.rushkoff.com\\\/2002_10_01_archive.php#85554975&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/rushkoff.com\\\/2002_10_01_archive.php&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have time to comment much right now, but I sure hope that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rushkoff.com\/2002_10_01_archive.php#85554975\" title=\"Bush's big bluff\">Douglas Rushikoff is right<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  It&#8217;s not &#8216;conspiracy theory,&#8217; as some of my readers have accused me, to suggest that Bush may not actually want to spend the lives of Americans to invade Iraq. It is quite possible &#8212; no matter how evil or misguided you believe Bush to be &#8212; that he would rather not waste a few hundred or thousand American lives, or a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, on pipelines and additional security against nuclear\/chemical\/germ threat. Bush would rather do it the easy way than the hard way. He&#8217;d stand a better chance of being re-elected if he could cow Iraq into true submission without a full-scale war.<\/p>\n<p>  In order to do this, though, he needs to convince Saddam Hussein that he&#8217;s coming in, and that he&#8217;s coming in no matter what Chirac, Putin, or any other more &#8220;reasonable&#8221; statesman advises. He needs to appear like a chicken without a head &#8212; a driver without a wheel &#8212; careeing inexorably towards invasion. He needs Saddam to believe that America doesn&#8217;t have the mechanisms to flinch.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not &#8216;conspiracy theory,&#8217; as some of my readers have accused me, to suggest that Bush may not actually want to spend the lives of Americans to invade Iraq. It is quite possible &#8212; no matter how evil or misguided you believe Bush to be &#8212; that he would rather not waste a few hundred or thousand American lives, or a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, on pipelines and additional security against nuclear\/chemical\/germ threat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2042],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}