BUT YOU SAID...

President Bush and Iraq compared to Lincoln and the Civil War, Wilson and WW I.

Right wing revisionism?

No - it comes from Liberal NYT columnist Thomas Friedman.

And I think he makes sense.

Where did Bush's passion for making the Arab world safe for democracy come from?

Though the president mentioned this theme before the war, it was not something he stressed with the public, Congress or the United Nations in justifying an Iraq invasion. Rather, he relied primarily on the urgent need to pre-emptively strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

A cynic might say that Bush was always interested only in stripping Iraq of its WMD. But with no WMD having been unearthed thus far in Iraq, and with the costs of the war in lives and dollars soaring, the president felt he needed a new rationale. And so he focused on the democratization argument.

But there is another explanation, one that is not incompatible with the first but is less overtly cynical. It is a story about war and events and how they can transform a president.

"It often happens," argues Michael Sandel, the Harvard political theorist, "that presidents, under the pressure of events, especially during war, find themselves needing to articulate new and more persuasive rationales for their policies -- especially when great sacrifices are involved. This happened to Lincoln during the Civil War. At the outset, the purpose of the Civil War for Lincoln was to oppose secession and preserve the Union. It was really only after the battle at Gettysburg that Lincoln articulated a larger purpose for the Civil War -- namely freedom and the elimination of slavery. Henceforth, the Civil War was not only to preserve the Union, but to bring about the promise of the Declaration of Independence -- written four score and seven years earlier."

As Lincoln insisted in his Gettysburg Address (while dedicating the cemetery at Gettysburg), "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom."

In Lincoln's case the rationale for the war shifted, not because he couldn't find any WMD in Dixie, but rather, argues Sandel, "because of the enormity of the sacrifice that the war was requiring. It no longer made moral sense that this great sacrifice could just be about keeping these states together, could just be about a political structure. It had to be about a bigger purpose and that was freedom and equality."