Max Boot's Bizarre Rewrite

This is from Max Boot's Commentary piece on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war:

I should make clear that, unlike some supporters of the war effort, I would not have backed the invasion if I had known what we now know—that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. There were, to be sure, secondary reasons to act, in particular the desire to implant a democracy in the middle of the Middle East. But, while I am a firm believer in democracy promotion, I don’t believe that its spread justifies exposing our soldiers to danger unless there is an overriding threat to our own security. 

Here is Max Boot in December 2002:

Many conservatives think, however, that "realism" presents far too crabbed a view of American power and responsibility. They suggest that we need to promote our values, for the simple reason that liberal democracies rarely fight one another, sponsor terrorism, or use weapons of mass destruction. If we are to avoid another 9/11, they argue, we need to liberalize the Middle East— a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again.

The most prominent champions of this view inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Their agenda is known as "neoconservatism," though a more accurate term might be "hard Wilsonianism." Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson's championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives. ("Soft Wilsonians," a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles Krauthammer's trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.) Like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, "hard Wilsonians" want to use American might to promote American ideals.  

This is, in case you haven't guessed, my own view too.

Here is more from 2002:

Iraq is next on the democratization list. Once U.S. troops invade and occupy Iraq, they will have no choice but to create a liberal national government. It's simply impossible to imagine U.S. forces handing power to some general — a mini-Saddam — and washing our hands of the place, as a few people in Washington still advocate. That's not the American way. We come as liberators spreading freedom. Which is not to say that Iraq can easily be made into a perfect democracy, or even a Turkish-style democracy, but that's what we will have to shoot for.