Saturday, October 25, 2003

Debating Dean. Dean, you wrote "The list goes on, and any one of them alone was sufficient to justify our action".  It's hard to believe you just wrote that. Here is the main reason for going to war: Someone _attacks_ you.  An army shows up, in one of your cities.  You kill them.  That is the ONLY completely justifiable, slam-dunk, "it's ok" reason for war. What you are talking about are levels of political BS.  Do you seriously believe that, isolated from the other points, violating the oil-for-food program is a trigger for war?  I don't think you do, but that's what you just wrote. There were good reasons to liberate Iraq, and there were good reasons, at the time, to do the same thing in any number of countries around the world.  Based on the criteria you've provided for going to war, we could be in a war almost anywhere in the world, if we felt like it.  We don't. The real question is not whether Iraq deserved freedom from Hussein.  The real question is why we picked Iraq, as opposed to other countries, where we might have done more good with a lot less money? The Administration _selected_ Iraq, out of a list of countries where an active military policy could create change, to implement long-standing neo-conservative policy.  The answer to the selection question was, at the time, "because Iraq support and supplies terrorists, and because Iraq has WMD".  We now know, with reasonable certainty, that neither of these things is true.  My opinion is that the White House went fishing in the murky waters of intelligence, and fashioned justification out of selective inclusion. Creating a liberal straw man who simply says "no justification" may be an entertaining exercise for you, but that person pretty much does not exist.  Every time you say "there WERE valid reasons for going into Iraq" what you're really saying is that you DON'T CARE about truthfulness before a war, and that the ends justify the means. And to bring this thing around full circle: If we're not in a war because we've been attacked, we'd better be pretty damn airtight in our reasoning.  Bush took a gamble and he lost.  The bet wasn't on the outcome of the war -- that was a foregone conclusion.  The bet was that evidence justifying the incredible size of the expenditure would show up. All that being said...the goal of a democratic Iraq is a worthy one.  I believe that an open debate on the question of whether military intervention was the best way to achieve it is appropriate. 11:48:35 AM     | comment [] | trackback []