Rationales for the War 

Rationales for the War

Tim Cavanaugh has another nice piece in Reason Online.

I will attempt a paraphrase. The Administration has offered different and even somewhat contradictory rationales for the invasion of Iraq. As rationalizers always do, they probably hoped the accumulation of several rationales would be much more powerful than one or two on their own, as if each one can only add to the case. In fact, however, the reason that there were so many rationales was no doubt that some of them were quite weak on their own. Once this fact is exposed, the whole pile are threatened with going down together--more or less as a pack of lies or pathetic pretexts for doing what one wants to do.

(Here goes an analogy to Vietnam again).

Perhaps the grandest rationale is one that, according to Cavanaugh, the President himself has not really offered--"a more democratic Iraq, with greater personal freedoms, could inspire democratic trends throughout the Middle East."

Cavanaugh says: "It's a measure of how much contempt President Bush has for the American voters that even now he won't spell out the goal of the Iraq mission in plain terms."

"the administration that singlehandedly made the war happen should be advancing more inspiring arguments than possible exit strategies, better international burden-sharing, or a relatively low cost."

Of course even a relatively successful outcome for this approach "would keep the United States intimately involved in Middle East politics for a hundred years, and end up transforming America as much as it does the Middle East." Are Americans ready for that? Would candidate Bush have done anything other than laugh at it during the 2000 campaign?

A witty observation from Michael Kinsley in Slate: "While apologizing to the citizenry, Bush could win even more brownie points, at almost no cost, by apologizing specifically to his predecessor. Bush ridiculed Bill Clinton's efforts to follow up military interventions with 'nation building.' Believe it or not, this was a pejorative term, implying unrealistic ambitions. Now Bush talks about turning Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy."