The WMD Betrayal

The rest of America has blame enough to bear for what those endured who went to Iraq on our mission -- military and civilian -- and for what the Iraqis suffer. We could have done better. We let them down. We let them all down.

But we -- and they -- were let down in turn by this administration. I think the critics have it right who say that Bush and his inner circle were trapped in a permanent campaign mentality. They seemed unwilling or unable to lead, rule, or govern. But they were relentless at sapping domestic opponents and building majorities that would hold together just long enough.

As in all things, the Bush Administration was not the first to employ a bad executive policy; it merely took the bad policy to excess. Karl Rove was the manifestation; no purely political adviser should have a permanent home in the White House, and no war decisions ought to be made for political reasons (as they were, say, in Fallujah in 2004).

When it came to Iraq, I think, they couldn't help themselves. They did the one thing they knew how to do. They put together a platform with mass appeal. They lured in independents and pried key constituencies away from their opponents. They played on doubts and fears -- everything the Bush campaign squad did to beat McCain in 2000.

When you're running for office, you don't take the same message into every church, campus, or union hall. You tailor and weight the words to suit the audience. That's why the White House's run-up-to-war rhetoric seems so disjointed and scattered. Saddam's alleged ties to 9/11; the humanitarian justification; draining the swamp and spreading freedom. And, most potent of all, the WMD What-If.

The truth of that guessing game was somewhere on a scale between "Saddam has no WMD and no chance to get them" and "Saddam has stockpiles of the most lethal weapons, including nukes." How much risk are you willing to take? That was how the administration pitched it to the center, to the mass of Americans unmoved by emotional or visionary or utopian or conspiratorial arguments. The pitchers were Powell and Rice, the cabinet voices with the most appeal to the moderates. The sober, calculating set of people who think of themselves as guided by common sense, not partisan propaganda. Including a great many in the media.

Which is why the failure to find significant stockpiles or an active program hurt so much. The Saddam-did-9/11 zealots weren't going to be dissuaded by evidence of any sort. To the drain-the-swamp/humanitarian justification people, the WMD argument was secondary, if still important. Its unravelling did not seem at first to derail their hopes. Their justification for war lay elsewhere.

But I think the media had gone along, and most of the pundit class, and a great many voting people, on the basis of the WMD What-If. To discover the Administration had gambled on that and lost so badly -- gambled our trust and international credibility -- turned a great deal of opinion sour. It became "Bush's War" to a new set of people who felt betrayed. Some joined the anti-war protesters. Many just sat it out.

No doubt it had an impact on a great many people who went to fight the war at our bidding, and their families who endured their absences and feared for them. But they still managed to do what we asked, even when we asked impossible and contradictory things. No matter what you might glean from watching TV news, the better part of us has been in Iraq these past five years.

That none of this was historically unusual in wars ("Mr. Madison's War," "Mr. Polk's War," "Mr. Lincoln's War") hardly mattered. That some chemical weapons actually turned up in Iraq hardly mattered. That most other credible voices, including anti-war ones, also presumed until May 2003 that Saddam had some level of WMD (Ralph Nader and Scott Ritter, I think, were notable exceptions who came out and predicted he didn't -- but that was a guess, too), didn't matter, either.

In America, you can win elections by bluff. Then you've got four years to govern while the people discover the bluff, and when it's time to run again, you can start over with a new bluff. It doesn't work that way in war. You have to get it right every day.

Like this post itself, the Iraq War became, to the 99 percent of Americans who weren't over there, a political matter. It was about the domestic relationships, the hostilities and betrayals and lies and slanders. About who was going to be forever excluded from the national debates hereafter.

[I was not a WMD What-If backer of the invasion, though I admit the argument had an influence on me. I came around on the humanitarian/draining the swamp side. If anything, what I learned in reading the oil-for-food revelations made me more fearful of Saddam's potential for destructiveness, measured in terms of the near future, than I was before the war.]

[I should add that this is a post about one aspect of the war and the history of it; it is not a complete statement of my views about it. It is about what I think happened in our country, in part, not about what ought to have happened or what ought to happen next.]

Failure to Communicate

[posted by Callimachus]

I should just stop reading Memeorandum. It does me no good and makes me mean-mad like Tom Joad.

I see a link to this opinion piece which seems to me to raise an essential question -- the one I've been grappling with all through this war/occupation: This ought to have been the "liberals' war." It promised the projection of American might in the interest, partially if not largely, of a humanitarian cause. It came at a moment when national interest dovetailed with a bid to make a suffering swath of the world a better place. Nation-building was a liberal cause. Cleansing the world of our bad bargains from the Cold War was a liberal cause.

I understand people who saw that and were tempted by it but backed off out of suspicious of Bush and company and their former unwillingness to do any of that, of Rumsfeld's known contempt for nation-building, and of the evidently muddled motivations. All us old Cold War liberals who weren't outright pacifists had to pause and ponder and cross that bridge, or not.

But so many seemed never to acknowledge the humanitarian justification, or that such a thing even could exist. So many seemed to focus so entirely on Bush and his administration that they never bothered to address the thing in the context of what a liberal foreign policy and military policy ought to look like. Or whether such a thing would be worth doing with an administration they trusted.

It baffled me, because some of our heroes among the eloquent champions of liberalism around the world were persuaded -- tempted, if you must -- by the humanitarian justification for the war. If not America, who will do it? If not now, when it nearly converged with her national interest, when? It seemed to me that many self-identifying liberals at that watershed moment revealed themselves as more America-hostile than essentially liberal. It was where I and others finally parted ways with many former political bedfellows.

It didn't turn out anything like I had hoped. Those who acknowledged the humanitarian justification but were overruled by their suspicion of the administration's motives or competence have the right to say they were both liberal and astute. More so than I was. Those who merely trashed the whole thing as blood-for-oil and naked Israel-inspired imperialism, and who write as though the alternative to overthrowing Saddam was to live forever in February 2003, can't claim that. But they are the ones who most loudly do.

Anyway, the above column was written by one Jonah Goldberg, whose name I see kicked (literally) around the Web a lot. He seems to be a neo-con legacy of some sort. But his argument was essentially the same one used by José Ramos Horta and Václav Havel and André Glucksmann, updated with some quotes from current Democratic candidates. As with John Kerry in 2004, none of them has answered the dilemma to my satisfaction; none seems to have tried. If I could ask it, I might frame it like this: With reference to both military and diplomatic themes, and in light of Oil-for-Food revelations and the blackmailability of our old allies in Europe (cf. the recent deal with Libya over the doctors), what is a post-Cold War liberal American policy for dealing with rogue nations, former U.S. allies who also happen to be genocidal maniacs, and dangerous regional tyrants? Does our commitment to freedom and liberties and the rights of man die at the borders? What should be the role and weight of human rights and the better angels of human nature in guiding our decisions about national interest?

So I see via Memeorandum one of the progressive (for want of a better word) bloggers has weighed in on this column. And it is one who is often mentioned with respect by many of the un-progressive (for want of ...) people I read and respect. So I follow the link to find an answer. But I don't find one. The question never gets consideration. The whole post is an extended, foul-mouthed ad hominem rant, with an impenetrable title and nothing to even explain the depth of the fury. It amounts to "How dare he ask that?"

It's hardly even ad hominem because the homo in question never appears. The piece just assumes we know the name and know exactly why it's impossible for him to ask that question. Perhaps in the echo chamber, that is true. If the problem is Goldberg, she never explains that. If the argument is simply rubbish and the facts are simply wrong, as claimed, she never shows you how. The blogger can't be bothered. And frankly, after venting about it thus, neither can I.

Hard-Nosed Idealists

[posted by Callimachus]

Ali Eteraz is an indispensible Web voice for many reasons: He has a personal perspective on things most of the rest of us lack; he is a sharp thinker and an able writer; he seemingly is immune to the gravitational and magnetic influence of political factions.

He takes different positions than I do on many questions of the day, but I always trust he arrives at them honestly, and after hard thinking, and I find myself hoping he disagrees with me when the matter is of some complexity, because then I can test my reasoning against his, which has a better chance than the usual blog mush of making or breaking it.

The trouble is, he's all over the map, with several Web sites of his own and posting privileges at several more.

Here, for instance, he drives a stake through the silly fetish of Western commentators for turncoat Islamists. As though someone with sufficiently dim wits to join a suicide bomber cult acquires intellectual clarity when he stumbles away from it.

If anything, the same mentality that led him to first seek out a one-stop utopia in radicalism, upon his conversion, leads him to posit a one-stop solution to it as well. Further, reliance upon these "former" radicals and criminals keeps the discourse about violence stuck in the past. We keep doing historiography; the terrorists keep evolving.

And, he might have added, as though any traitor ever could teach you anything useful about the mindset of the loyal. It reminds me of the response I have, mostly kept to myself, to stories of people who were clinically dead and were revived, which are supposed to prove an afterlife: Yes, we know something about people who died and came back; we still don't know a damn thing about people who died and stayed dead.

At Dean's World he has a rollicking tenure as the dynamic Dean's gadfly, and the resulting arguments have been full of both heat and light. In the post I linked, he attempts a comprehensive dismantling of the humanitarian justification for the overthrow of Saddam and the bid to bring democracy to Iraq.

This happens to be the argument that was most persuasive to me in the run-up to the war. I won't say entirely persuasive, because personally I had questions and reservations up to the day it began, and I am more anti-anti-war -- to borrow a Cold War rhetorical trick -- than objectively pro-invasion. But I believe the best path for all concerned is to finish the war and win it decisively once you've begun it. And I took my stand on the humanitarian position, remembering that America's wars often start out over mean details and gradually open up into large missions for greater good undreamed of by the starters of wars.

Anti-Iraq War arguments I read online usually take a weird swerve about two thirds of the way through. When the writer has worked up some heat on the topic, he or she throws in a paragraph that says, "And anyway, it was US who armed Saddam and kept him in power. He was OUR creation," etc., etc. As though this, overstated as it usually is, is part of a good argument against the war instead of a good argument for it.

The war supporters usually don't recognize this, either. They push back with a reminder that our flirtation with Saddam was temporary, and he was armed principally by the Europeans and the Chinese.

All true, but none of it would have been possible without the context of the Cold War, which was a world half-shaped by American goals. It was the game and Saddam was a player. He was one of our bad bargains, along with Marcos and Somoza and Chiang Kai-shek and the Shah of Iran. One of those we rolled our eyes and held our noses and did business with.

The first and lasting policy of America in the Cold War was containment. The first points of conflict with the Soviets were at the periphery of its empire: Greece, Turkey, Iran, Korea. But both sides soon realized the Soviets could, and ideologically must, leapfrog over the geographical boundaries and expand into the "weak places" of the globe, especially those left vulnerable by the collapse of the old European empires. It became American policy to shore up the weak places. Often, too often, this was done on the cheap, with tough but poisonous and unstable local material.

Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule" was an anti-war argument about Iraq: If we break it, we bought it. It overlooked the fact we already had left the whole store a shambles by having an Old West barroom brawl with the Soviets over the length and breadth of it for 50 years. We are so justly relieved that the missiles never flew and the nuclear holocaust never happened that we forget the whole world was a battlefield. Not a bombs-and-bullets battlefield, but one torn and blooodied nonetheless.

Ali does not fall into this trap. His most effective tactic is to force Americans to imagine what sort of conditions would be necessary for us to invite a foreign intervention, which plays on our gumption and our lucky history (though some might remember the millions of blacks in the Confederacy). His least effective is a retreat into the absolute, inviolable authority of nation states, however degraded. I doubt he really wants to stick to that principle in every case.

He addresses the "Iraq was our responsibility" argument properly as a pro-intervention argument:

Even if you were to say to me that we needed to go into Iraq to right the wrongs of Reagan and Clinton, that's not good enough, because other countries are not play-things for our amusement and for mollification of our guilt. They are other countries. They have sovereignty. You believe that since we violated their sovereignty twice (indirectly in Iran-Iraq war, and directly in sanctions regime), we might as well do it again.

He doesn't take it back far enough; our footprint in Iraq is of older provenance than the 1991 war; it goes back to the 1970s. But I think his main mistake is he tries to address this as a humanitarian justification, and respond to it with the kind of scolding that would make a humanitarian blush.

It is not a humanitarian argument, essentially. It is a self-interested one, though it wears a mask of responsibility. That it is so is perhaps overlooked because it runs counter to the really cold-blooded Kissingerite self-interest that says you keep doing business with a Saddam; you keep him strong and on your side no matter how he smells. But there's more than one way to see self-interest.

A nation learns from its wars. The Russo-Japanese war may have taught American admirals something about how not to use battleships to break a blockade, but it didn't teach the American people any deep lessons.

Our Civil War did, however. One side fought it and won it and then gave up on the humanitarian aspect of the fight. It left the battlefield before the clean-up was complete, and a century later we were still tangled up in the consequences.

World War I did as well. America swallowed its determination never to get involved in European quarrels, and, just this once, for the sake of Lafayette, intervened. Then as quickly as it could it pulled up stakes and came home again, sealed off its economy, and sent out the bills. The consequence, as we learned, was 20 years later we had to go back and do it all again, on a larger scale at a greater cost. Once again, we paid a price in blood for leaving the war without cleaning up the battlefield.

We almost repeated the mistake after World War II, with a precipitous draw-down of the armed forces that had to be reversed, painfully, once the Cold War became clear to us.

When the Cold War ended our old tendencies kicked in. We gave Russia no Marshall Plan, and perhaps as a consequence kleptocrats and crypto-totalitarians now rule the world's largest chunk of real estate and its remaining nuclear arsenal. We left the odious Taliban alone in Afghanistan, and we felt their sting on Sept. 11.

Saddam? Who knew what he had up his sleeve. It was all a degree of suspicion or doubt, till he was gone. We knew what he coveted, however. And how ruthlessly he would use it. And how the anguish of his people under U.N. sanctions was a rallying cry for the Osamas of the Middle East. And how much he was a creature of our last battlefield. And the lesson, the hard-nosed, realpolitik lesson that Americans have become alert to, is, you clean up your battlefields. In the matrix of causes and shadows that brought America into Iraq in 2003, this was not least among them.

Emmott's Farewell

Bill Emmott, in his final column as editor of "The Economist," stands by his support of the war to overthrow Saddam:

This will outrage some readers, but I still think the decision was correct — based on the situation at that time, which is all it could have been based on. The risk of leaving Saddam in power was too high. Outside intervention in other countries' affairs is difficult, practically, legally and morally. It should be done only in exceptional circumstances, and backed by exceptional efforts. Iraq qualified on the former. George Bush let us — and America — down on the latter. So, however, did other rich countries: whatever they thought of the invasion, they had a powerful interest in sorting out the aftermath. Most shirked it.

The only argument against our decision that seems to me to have force is that a paper whose scepticism about government drips from every issue should have been sceptical about Mr Bush's government and its ability to do things properly in Iraq. This is correct: we should have been, and we were. But when the choice is between bad options and worse ones, a choice must still be made. Great enterprises can fail — but they fail twice over if they take away our moral courage and prevent us from rising to the next challenge.

That looks about right to me. At this point, that's what those of us who supported the war are left with. I said at the beginning it will be 20 years before we know if it's a good idea, but even if it turns out spectacularly well in 2023, it will be through some mechanism I didn't foresee or predict.

But I absolutely would support it again. I grew up with an America that used its power often in twisted ways -- twisted by the artificial pressures and fears of the Cold War and summed up by the phrase "He's a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch." For once, then, I got to see all that might used to do something that actually aligned with our national values: to give a perfectly oppressed people an imperfect liberty, as the French and the Dutch gave us in 1778.

Oh, of course the Iraq War was "about" a whole lot more than that. It was about the oil (how could it not be?), and about the grudge, and about a gritty and practical matter of making the world safe for the West, and about the doubt about what Saddam had and what he was doing with it. All in all, it was a matrix-point decision (mistaken, willfully, by many in the anti camp as a "shifting rationale"). It was a sad choice that was the best among seriously crappy alternatives. It ought to have worked. Among the lessons to be learned is another one I'd add to Emmott's short list of what we ought to have seen coming: If you can't explain a war in 10 words or less, don't start it.

Kanan Makiya

Sullivan calls attention to this attention-worthy December 2005 interview with Kanan Makiya. Makiya bravely called attention to Saddam's crimes in the 1990s, when doing so could get you killed and most in the West just weren't that concerned about them. He also was part of the "Iraqi Opposition" before the war and witnessed at close range the running of it by the White House.

His observations confirm what a lot of people who watched it from greater distance seemed to be sensing:

"You either do an occupation and you do it well, or you don't do it in the first place. But you don't do it in a half-assed way, with inadequate troop levels to boot!
The United States government never deployed enough troops. It opted for an occupation but didn't provide the wherewithal to do the job properly. Here again is this tension between the Pentagon and the Department of State. State wants an occupation, but Rumsfeld — who has theories about how to conduct warfare in the modern age with less and less troops — never wanted an occupation. In fact, he may never even have been for Iraqi democratisation. He was just an in-and-out kind of a guy. It was the other people within the defence department, in particularly the really extraordinary figure of Paul Wolfowitz, who argued the political case for democracy."

It reminded me of a snippet that's been lodged in my head from a December '03 article in the Observer on Ann Clwyd, the left-wing British MP who backed Blair over Iraq for humanitarian reasons. In it, she told of a meeting with Wolfowitz in the Pentagon in May of that year.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and as far as many in the anti-war coalition are concerned the man most to blame for events in Iraq, put his head around the door. 'You're the man with the brains,' he said cheerily, gesturing to his deputy. 'I'm just the office boy.'

It might have seemed like just a jaunty self-effacing remark at the time, or praise for the now-departed-from-the-Pentagon Wolfowitz. But now it seems like deep irony.

Sullivan adds:

But Rumsfeld trumped Wolfowitz. My own view is that Cheney and Rumsfeld had and still have no interest in democratization, and have been "to-hell-with-them hawks" from Day One.

Right. When I see Cheney listed among the "neo-cons." I get cartoon question marks over my head. I mean, the term is amorphous and undefinable, but I feel like I know one when I see one, and Cheney's not one. Never was.

Sullivan continues:

But the real responsibility lies with the president who, as Makiya points out, seemed unable to lead decisively. Makiya is admirably frank about his own mistakes as well - particularly his misreading of the state of the Iraqi army in the last days of Saddam, which, by the time of invasion, had already basically disintegrated. But that new insight leads us to a better understanding of the last three years, and where we are now:

"When the war came the army did not fight. There was no Iraqi defeat in 2003 in the sense there was a defeat of the Nazis or the Japanese armies in World War Two. The army just disintegrated. There was no war of liberation in that sense. Our liberation and our civil war are occurring now, simultaneously, so to speak."

Reminder

In 2003, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney wanted to put the U.S. military to work to overthrow Saddam Hussein. So did I. That's about as far as the resemblance goes. Yet I feel as though anti-war people keep asking me to bend over to take punishment for what Bush said about going to war, and keep steering me toward the position that the WMD case was the only case ever seriously made, therefore the only grounds on which I must make my stand to defend my support of this particular military action.

Frankly, Bush never convinced me about the war. Tony Blair did. Even the hostile "Guardian" could sum up his position in an appealing way, as it did in this leader from 3/31/03:

Mr Blair has invaded Iraq for different reasons from Mr Rumsfeld. In Mr Blair's world, Saddam is a moral outrage, both for the way that he treats his own people and for the threat that he poses to others, especially if he were to use weapons of mass destruction or to put them into the hands of terrorists. Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair's view, should be the whole world's business. The more that all the nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a series of equitable and humanitarian initiatives - on the Middle East and on reconstruction in particular - which can help to establish what Disraeli, seeking to justify the British invasion of Abyssinia in 1867, called "the purity of our purpose".

In addition to my own reasoning, I was convinced by the words of leftists like Johann Hari:

Who are the real imperialists here: those who want to carry out the wishes of the Iraqi people, or those who want to ignore them in the name of a non-existent peace? And, yes, it was non-existent. There is no peace if, at any time, people can be captured, tortured, burned or raped. Read the Amnesty reports. This was the everyday reality of Saddam's Iraq. Only the dishonest can say that British and American soldiers are interrupting "peace"; they are interrupting a decades-long war, waged by Saddam against the Iraqi people, to bring it to an end. Do not weep that this happening; be proud.

...It might seem perverse to seek to spread peace at the barrel of a gun; but the peace we enjoy here in Europe exists only because we (along with the Americans) acted with weaponry to banish tyrants. The Iraqi people want and deserve the same. If their wishes -– as reported unambiguously by Kenneth Joseph and many more like him –- are not compatible with international law, then an urgent priority once this war is over must be to reconstruct international law to make it encourage, not hinder, the overthrow of tyranny. ["The Independent," March 26, 2003]

I was convinced by the likes of the French philosopher André Glucksmann:

Nobody wants war, me included. The question is, is there something worse than war? I have been answering "yes" for years. One thing that is worse than war is genocide –- that is, the extinction of a whole people. Many people said this before Auschwitz. In Greek tragedy, it is revealed in the destruction of Troy. This is indeed the horizon of western history. That is why I don’t believe that the refusal to take part in a war against Saddam should be seen as an expression of humanism, but of a blindness that exists not only in Europe, but in all civilisations. We all want to live peacefully, oblivious and happy. That wish already existed in ancient Athens, and there is nothing wrong with it as such, except that it is not very realistic.

Interviewer: Do you think France will stick to its opposition against the US?

Longer than in Germany. Here in our country, the rivalry with America is more prominent. But at the moment, the people in the street are only asking themselves, how can we stand up against Bush? Saddam Hussein doesn’t come into the equation, and that is where my whole objection lies. Because the issue here is actually Saddam.

Bush is a challenge for American democracy; Aznar, the challenge for Spanish democracy. Why are there fewer protestors in France than in Spain, England or Italy? Because in Italy they fight Berlusconi, in Britain they fight Blair –- and in France they fight nobody.

But the overriding question remains: what about Saddam Hussein? If I may be a little moralistic here: I could not look at myself in the mirror if Saddam Hussein were still in power because I have been to a demonstration against Bush, and as a result, the people in Iraq had to live in this totalitarian regime for another twenty years.

And by another exquisite "Guardian" columnist (now former columnist), David Aaronovitch:

This war for me has always been a fine judgment call, a choice between deeply shitty alternatives (my big argument with some in the anti-war campaign has been their belief that there are -- or were -- No-Die options in Iraq). Agnostic on the threat of weapons of mass destruction (though believing that Saddam would develop them if permitted to), sceptical on alleged Iraqi links with new Osama bin Laden-type groups, it finally came down to the lesser of these three evils: Saddam unchained; a "contained" Saddam plus sanctions and endless inspections; invasion and no Saddam. In the end, I chose the latter.

Even so, there has always been the possibility of a war that was worse even than another 20 years of Saddam, Uday, Qusay, Chemical Ali and Dr Germ. And there have been moments in the past few days when I have wondered whether we aren't fighting it.

... Kosovo was, most of us agree, "worth it." Worth it even though we hit the train on the bridge at Leskovac, killing 10, and the refugee convoy at Prizren in Kosovo which slaughtered more than 70. "Worth it" to both Robin Cook (then foreign secretary) and me. As was the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 or, in Afghanistan, the infamous missile attack on the gun-toting wedding party.

If this sounds callous, my answer is that we make choices like this all the time. Except no one rushes to the scene of motorway crashes to report on how an ill-timed phone-call, speeding, or pre-drive joint has left body parts scattered along the fast lane of the M6. We know it, but you still couldn't get 500 people to London to call for the end of the motor car. In Kosovo the scenes from the border justified our actions to us at a time when the action seemed most pointless and brutal. Right now, there are no pictures from Baghdad of the summary executions and the beheadings; Rageh Omar has not been taken to see those. Yet. But if we could see inside those buildings and speak to some of the families of victims, the calculation might change.

Or by the American journalist Michael Kelly, who died in April 2003 covering the war in Iraq:

I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realised. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot? ["New Republic," Feb. 26, 2003]

Or by our friend Michael J. Totten:

It’s true that many people are dead in Iraq because of what we did. It’s equally true that a larger number are alive because of what we did. The well-being of Iraqis isn’t even remotely what’s at issue to Mr. Savoy. He only cares that we are morally pure. Tyranny, barbarism, and genocide are fine with him in a lesser-evil sort of way as long as we can sit safe and sound on our side of the ocean and not have to dirty ourselves by messing with it.

Not only is this morally reprehensible, it isn’t even logical. We do not sit safe and sound on this side of the ocean as the terrorism on September 11, preceded by Al Qaeda’s genocidal death warrant, has already shown. The political culture of the Middle East absolutely is our business. Middle Eastern political science topples buildings and kills thousands in our own cities.

Paul Savoy is a September 10th person. He doesn’t understand that we’re war whether we’re happy about it or not.

Or by José Ramos-Horta, 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work in East Timor:

Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early '80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed "Emperor" Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened--without a U.N. mandate--to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world's most barbaric regimes.

So why do some think Iraq should be any different? Only a year after his overthrow, they seem to have forgotten how hundreds of thousands perished during Saddam Hussein's tyranny, under a regime whose hallmark was terror, summary execution, torture and rape. Forgotten too is how the Kurds and Iraq's neighbors lived each day in fear, so long as Saddam remained in power.

... In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.

Or the "anti-totalitarian justification" argument of Adam Michnik, the leading force in the Solidarity trade union movement who founded and edits Poland's largest daily newspaper:

We take this position because we know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. Even if a dictatorship is not an ideal typical one, and even if the democratic countries are ruled by people whom you do not like. I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfield is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

...

It's simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped. I've always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended. I would object to U.S. policy if it supported Saddam Hussein, and I have always criticized the United States for supporting military regimes in Latin America.

...

Well, who was worse, Ronald Reagan or Leonid Brezhnev? If I were American I would never have voted for Reagan, but as a Pole, I liked the tough position of Reagan toward Brezhnev. Perhaps Reagan did not quite understand what he was doing, and maybe Bush doesn't understand either. But the facts are that, suddenly, Libya has begun to speak a different language. Syria has begun to speak a different language. Even North Korea has started to speak a different language. This is not to say that Bush is always right. Of course not. But you must see the hierarchy of threats, of dangers. I asked my French and German friends, Are you afraid that tomorrow Bush will bomb Paris? And can you really be sure that terrorists and fundamentalists will not attack the Louvre? So which side are you on?

So, if you want to discuss my thoughts about making war on Saddam, start with those references and not with an assumption of ideological lock-step identification with the White House.