Bill Maher: Success in Iraq was unplanned
Yikes! I haven’t seen an episode of Bill Maher’s HBO-show, “Real Time” in a while. But someone mentioned to me that he was supporting the war in Iraq recently, so I went to find a transcript.
According to Maher, Iraq is turning into a success story. But it’s only because of Bush’s stupidity that it happened. Or maybe it was his plan from the start, but he lied to us about WMD to achieve all this democratic goodness. But in the end, the Iraq war was a Good Thing, saved countless lives, and will possibly lead to peace in the Middle East… according to Bill Maher.
Guests: Rep. BARNEY FRANK, (D) Massachusetts, ANDREW BREITBART, IRSHAD MANJI, RICHARD BELZER and CAMILLE PAGLIA
…
MAHER: –because – but I don’t know if the Bush Administration does like this [wall-to-wall Atlata courthouse shooting coverage] because there’s a lot of good news coming out of, I think, you know, the source of it is what happened in Iraq. Okay, this week—BELZER: [overlapping] The agreement among the Shiites and—
MAHER: Agreement, Shiites and the Kurds agreed to a government in Iraq. Nobody heard about that.
BELZER: Right, that should be a banner headline.
MAHER: Yes. How about the fact that in Spain somebody issued a fatwa against Bin Laden? … The revolution has started.
MANJI: It sure has.
MAHER: Is there any turning back?
MANJI: You know, I actually think the worm has turned in the Islamic world, and I can tell you that I’m hearing this from younger Muslims all over the world. In the last two months alone, since the “purple finger” revolution of Iraq, more and more liberal voices are becoming heard.
By the way, are you suggesting that perhaps George W. Bush had a sliver of savvy?
MAHER: I’ve said it before.
MANJI: You have?
MAHER: Yeah. Watch our show. [laughter]
…
MAHER: Everywhere—
…
MAHER: Well, I was reading Fareed Zakaria this week.
…
MAHER: Smart guy, as always. And he said, you know what, he said, “The fact that George Bush didn’t know a lot about the Middle East actually turned out to be a virtue.” And it’s true. I was all over George Bush, like Reagan, for – you know, you don’t know much about foreign affairs. And Fareed said, “You know what? He knew so little that he could imagine a world that other people didn’t bother to imagine because they were so stuck in their thinking. And this guy was just dumb enough to say, maybe it could look differently.” [applause]
…
BREITBART: But what – I’ll say this: if you’re willing to admit that you’re wrong, I’m willing to admit that I’m wrong, and many of the people on my side are wrong because we thought that the Muslims did not have this in them. We had low expectations of what they expected of themselves.MAHER: Right.
BELZER: Had what in them? To continue to repress women, to hate Jews, to hate white people, to hate Christians? To have a theocracy?
…
BELZER: And a civil war? And thousands of our kids are slaughtered and mutilated for an idea—
…
BELZER: For these people that beat themselves with chains and hate us and detest us, they’ve had a 7,000-year head start on us. They don’t have democracy. Who are we to shove it down their throats? They don’t want our democracy. They want us out of there. [voices overlap] [applause]
…
BELZER: So they can kill each other!BREITBART: Maybe in democracy, we can find out they actually don’t want to oppress women.
MAHER: Yes.
MANJI: I’d rather have the ten p.m. slot. Listen, I have heard from so many Iraqi women, Richard—
…
MANJI: –who have said, why is it that more stories aren’t being done about how grateful we are that Saddam Hussein is out of there.MAHER: Yes.
MANJI: And you know why they’re grateful? This is what they tell me. For no other reason than when he’s gone, it means that the Iraqi people have to confront themselves.
…
MANJI: And that is when they can begin taking responsibility for their future.MAHER: You know, I read something that you wrote that I thought – again, I don’t think people hear this side of it – is that what the people over there in Iraq and a lot of the Middle East were saying – when we asked that question, “Why do they hate us?” – it wasn’t because that we intervened too much in their affairs, it’s that we intervened too little.
…
MAHER: So they wanted us to be there more, not less.
…
MAHER: Well, we do agree with this then. When George Bush was selling the Iraq war, and there’s no doubt he lied to sell this war. [applause]
…
MAHER: Now, maybe every war has to be lied about to be sold.
…
MAHER: But he – you know, his first reason was weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda. All bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
…
MAHER: About the fourth reason that he listed for going to the war is the reason we’re there now.
…
MAHER: To spread democracy, to start this brushfire of democracy in the Arab world so that maybe long-range we modernize them away from terrorism. If he had just said that to begin with, he would have had me at “Hello.” [laughter]
…
MAHER: These are the people who I’m arguing with now.
…
MAHER: My liberal friends.
…
MAHER: Who, you know, I have to say to them, it can’t start with “I hate Bush” and then work backwards to how you want to deal with the present. It’s not 2003. It’s 2005. Facts have to come before hate. I know that’s terrible.
…
MAHER: But, Richard, if Saddam Hussein had been in power this whole time—
…
MAHER: –that we took – we kicked him over, I don’t know how many dead Iraqis there’d be, but there was a lot of dead Iraqis when he was on power also.
…
MAHER: I think what we’re saying is because Syria turned in the bad guy, okay, Lebanon is looking at democracy; Egypt is looking at democracy. A lot of countries are getting the message now. If this has started something that ten-20 years down the road, saves millions of lives—BELZER: I bet you right now that in every one of those countries you named, there’ll be civil war and not democracy.
MAHER: Civil war sometimes is the necessary step toward something different.