Howard Dean's deceptive morality

Day 2 of the Democratic Convention in Boston: Rich Lowry unpacks Howard Dean's speech at the DNC Convention.

Dean claimed he wanted "to see America restored as the moral leader of the world."

Was it moral to impose draconian sanctions on 22 million Iraqis--the most advanced Arab society--in order to contain their unelected leader, Saddam Hussein? Over the summer, I posed this question to numerous interns--they hail from Stanford, Harvard, Tufts, Boston College--working for Kerry's re-election.

A surprising number of them didn't even know that nearly a million Iraqis, mostly kids, perished as a result of the US-backed UN embargo.

But during the 12-year period when the sanctions were in force, most antiwar liberals like Howard Dean were assailing this low-intensity, sneaky war. In 2002, Dean's good friend, David Bonior, D-Mich, former House Majority Leader, famously described the sanctions as "infanticide masquerading as policy". Other liberals have written volumes on how the sanctions on Iraq amounted to collective punishment and were thus a violation of the Geneva Conventions, even as their leader, one Bill Clinton, slowly arrived at the conclusion that the containment strategy was a debacle.

In signing the Iraq Liberation Act (1998), Clinton boldly declared that it was time for a new, democratic Iraq to "rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member," noting that this was "in our interest and that of our allies within the region". Clinton insisted that "the evidence is overwhelming that such changes will not happen under the current Iraq leadership."

So when Bush 43 embraced the Iraq Liberation Act, why all this drama from the Democrats? Why now when Saddam and his sons have permanently lost their ability to build WMD or threaten their own people and neighboring countries--now that sanctions on Iraqis have been lifted?