yes to the first question, and no to the second.

will you really be shocked to learn that for those who support the war, actually finding wmds was never a critical issue? the pretext was not the presence of them, but the effort to obtain and develop them--which, as the kay report states, was happening. my support for the war came from its role in a long-term strategy to bring democracy and--i'm going to assume you know where i'm going with this.

i'm no defender of george bush, but i did support the war (and still do). the administration did a horrible job of selling the war to the public and explaining just why it is so important, and an even worse job of rouniing up international support for the war. so while the hersh article does lay out a complete misunderstanding of the intelligence process on the part of the white house, i'm not of the mind that "gosh, we've made a terrible mistake."

The Kay report tells me that Iraq was much lower on the list of states dangerous to the US (and the world) than we were led to believe. Which means that if the aim was to reduce the threat of a repeat 9/11, money and lives would be much more efficiently spent elsewhere.

Same goes for any humanitarian arguments. Yes, obviously the Iraqis are much better off because of this war (though they don't seem to get it) but $150 billion is an awful lot of money to save 10,000 lives a year. You could eradicate entire diseases for that amount, saving millions of lives, and contain Saddam as he bullies his sandbox. Or you could buy everybody in Pakistan an education, putting the Madrassas out of business, killing two birds with one stone.

Had there not been any stovepiping, we might be doing that sort of stuff now, and the US would be basking in a lot more positive light, though somehow I think that course of action is completely antithetical to the neocon world view.

Well, as far as your last point, I totally disagree. It's clear that Bush made up his mind that he was going to war with Iraq--then he set about finding a suitable rationale to sell the public. That's precisely why the stovepiping occurred in the first place. If not WMD, it could have been a dozen other things.

The aim is, in one sense to prevent another 9/11, but it's also to address the root causes for militant fundamentalism. To do that, the neocons say, you need to eliminate the terrorist-supporting dictators and encourage democracy and free markets. Throwing money towards education and humanitarian aid won't solve these problems, as long as there are people running countries who support terrorism and kindle the flames against the US.

The object is to bring these reforms to Iraq and show that principles of open government are not incompatible with a Muslim culture. Iraq makes a great target for this since it is basically in the middle of things and borders two countries notorious for oppression. It will provide a tangible counterpoint to closed, dictatorial states. That, I believe, is a long-term goal which will both enhance quality of life for millions and remove the impetus for attacks against the United States in a way that traditional humanitarian aid just won't do. It's not just about Iraq; it's about the entire region.

What exactly do you believe is the "neocon world view," just out of curiosity?

I think you describe the neocon world view quite well. And it is a naive world view. Why should the average Arab take US motives at face value? The US has had one self-serving policy after another in the middle east for over 50 years. Why should that change now, in their minds? The credibility gap for the Americans is so huge in the region that the neocon plan is unfeasible. The WMD brouhaha isn't helping either.

Work towards changing that mindset by example, not by force. Carrots, not sticks. I bet it would work with Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and yes, Syria. In Iran, there is a huge moderate opposition that could be ushered in via elections.

And Bush really, really needs to tell Sharon to stop building settlements or say bye bye to all that aid. What the point of having client state if it does what it wants?

Stovepiping is clearly not in the best interests of the country; it is strictly a device used by ideologues.
I supported the war as a 'reluctant hawk' and still do. But that is one decision taken among several, and I disagree with the Bush administration on these other decisions. The biggest problem is Bush's support for Israel. I believe you can support the existence and security of Israel by encouraging its government to trade land for peace with Palestinians; security can only be assured once Palestinians are granted dignity.
Advancing the neo-con agenda in Iraq always had to be coupled with progress on Palestine. Unfortunately I don't think the Bush administration is convinced that there really is a link.
I also believe the Iraq invasion's prospects would be enhanced if we could point to more progress in Afghanistan; although that is a deeply troubled country that no outsider can fix, nonetheless the world should be giving Afghanistan more attention and support, and extending security beyond Kabul.
The US government could have gone to war against Iraq with more international support - and even a genuine UN sanction. But the arrogance of this administration from the outset has done the unthinkable, and caused the hegemon to lose its benign reputation. Although Bush's first visit to the UN was sincere, American diplomacy before and after never continued that work. So now Iraq is a US project.
I agree that the WMD issue was badly handled but ultimately an excuse. I also believe, however, that Saddam had the motive and intent to resume that program as soon as possible, and this would have eventually happened, with the French and Russians agitating against sanctions so.
Stefan, I suppose you could argue that, given the Bush administration has failed on these other fronts, it would be stupid to support the Iraq war. But at the time there were signs, particularly on Palestine, that American policy would come through. It hasn't. Does that invalidate the Iraq war? Time will tell but I'm just as wary of Hersh's skepticism as I am of Bush's rosy outlook. Not that I dispute Hersh's talent, but he has been negative from the start, and it's only fair to wonder if he stovepipes his own inputs too. It's a human weakness.

Very true. We see what we want to see.

With regards to the "carrot" issue, I see Stefan's solution as this: We should show them that if they attack us, we will give them money and hope they leave us alone. And this will make America safer. Got it. Here in Brooklyn, that's called extortion.

They should take our motives at face value because, if you haven't read a newspaper in the last few months, we are spending tens of billions of dollars we can't afford, and putting 125,000 people at risk, to rebuild an entire nation--electrical grids, fiberoptic networks, justice systems, police and fire departments, prisons, roads, building an army from scratch, fixing hospitals, railways, and ports.

Yet even with all this, the US is _still_ pursuing a self-serving policy. This is not great secret. But it so happens than in this venture, its interests stand to benefit average Arabs a great deal, in the long run, in the form of freedom and opportunity. The Arab leaders know this presents a threat to their hold on power. That is why they oppose it.

If Brooklyn had criminal gangs resident there that cauing all manner of havoc in Manhattan would you, as a Manhattanite, refuse to build hospitals, community centers or repair streets because that would be caving in to blackmail?

This "behave, or else" approach doesn't work because while 99.999% of people will obey the law, you only need 19 to cause 9/11. Collectively punishing the rest of the world for the actions of individuals is probably even counterproductive. Working to alleviate root causes through education and quality of life campaigns removs whatever passive support terrorists might get. There's so few of them -- the battle for the hearts of Muslims is much greater and more fundamental (pun) than the battle against existing terrorists.

leon, you write: "It's clear that Bush made up his mind that he was going to war with Iraq--then he set about finding a suitable rationale to sell the public." jame, you write: "I agree that the WMD issue was badly handled but ultimately an excuse."

the question you have to ask yourselves is this: if the reasons for taking over iraq are so compelling, why is a "suitable rationale to sell to the public", or an "excuse" necessary in the first place?

is it like when jack nicholson says "you want the truth? you can't handle the truth!!", and that the whole wolfowitzian regional security blather is just too complicated for the average citizen to understand? or is it that the reason for going to war is more atavistic and less well thought out than what we expect from responsible governments?

if you're correct, then congratulations on your sophistication; but by offering you "rationales" and "excuses" to sell things they have already decided on, the cheneyfeld administration is showing its utter contempt for your and my intelligence. i strongly object to this studied insult, and so should you. BTW, in my work, ideas that need to be sold hard generally tend not to be very good ones, certainly not ones people should get killed over.

Stefan I don't think you're understanding me. I guess we disagree over how to go about addressing root causes.

You propose humanitarian aid and education. I say, what circumstances led to their need for humanitarian aid? Why do these countries lack the infrastructure and industrial base to support their own people? Why are their educational systems so whacked in the first place? I say, it's tyrannical dictators who have held on to their power through oil profits and a manipulation of Islam. We need to break that cycle, by using military intervention to build a country that will set a positive example.

We can pour money into these humanitarian problems but without looking at the root cause of how this disparity came to be in the beginning, how do you know that we won't eventually wind up right back where we started?

The US _is_ rebuilding hospitals and educational systems like you propose. But to ensure these reforms aren't squelched as soon as the money runs out, it was necessary to remove the leaders first.

You're dead wrong about only requiring 19 to have another 9/11. Who got them their money? Who supported them? Who were the policemen who figured the activities of their supporters weren't worthy of investigation? Who had some incidental knowledge about what was to happen, but kept their mouth shut about it because they sympathized with the cause? We're talking about hundreds, possibly thousands of people. What is it about the culture that allows these individuals to continue operating? Will hospitals and malaria medicine address this problem?

Eurof, I mostly agree with you on this one. Like I said above, the White House did a horrible job of explaining why this war was so important, and yes, I do think that insults the intelligence of their constituency. But how exactly would they sell their larger motives to the public, though? It's complex and doesn't lend itself easily to soundbites--it's too easy to mischaracterize it as "cultural imperialism" and discard it for that reason.

Leon, I am impressed you've managed to keep your patience for so long. Stefan and I have gone round this little mulberry tree for many months now and he still insists on assuming that the administration's public justification for war is the only one worth considering. Also, this fruity crap about planting trees and building schools is exactly the kind of meaningless cant that helped get us into this position in the first place. Moreover, how this can be a financial question is something I'll never understand. You either do it, or not, because it is or isn't right, not because it's cost-efficient.

I do wonder whether opposition to the war and its aftermath stem more from Anti-Bushery. I wonder what would have happened if Clinton had done the same. He certainly had an identical Iraq policy to the Bush Admin., had been conducting a low-level war with Iraq for his entire presidency, and was never averse to invading countries without UN approval.

You've probably seen the WaPo article on how investigators now concede there was no weapons program either. This reduces the threat to the possibility that Saddam might restart such a program one day in the future if we don't let our guard down.

Matthew, really, in an elective war you should also ask yourself whether the goals are achievable, and look at the opportunity cost. Only if you're fighting with your back against the wall do such things not matter.

agreeing with stefan always makes me thinks i am wrong, so i hate doing it. then when i find myself agreeing with him against another inane matthew-ism i realise it's the lesser of two evils.

really matthew, you are a dolt if you think in foreign policy "you either do it, or not, because it is or isn't right, not because it's cost-efficient." clearly, YOU should have invaded iraq and tried single-handedly to unseat saddam. you obviously think it was the right thing to do, and if the cost (almost certain death) doesn't matter, well, go ahead. and if it's a bit late now, there's always syria, no better still north korea; throw yourself on the barbed wire on the DMZ and prove your point. personally i'd prefer you went back to thinking about sports, where you're less likely to do yourself a mischief.

leon, i'm sorry about matthew. but again, when you write "how exactly would they sell their larger motives to the public, though? It's complex and doesn't lend itself easily to soundbites" you don't get my point. selling WW2 was easy after pearl harbor, gulf war 1, easy after saddam invaded kuwait. both wars were good ideas, i think. wars that are harder to sell, like vietnam, tend to be harder to sell because they are bad ideas.

this war has been very hard to sell, and i think that is because it is a very very bad idea.

Financial cost, you spastic. Pay attention. The debate here has now shifted, sadly along Stefan's line of thinking, about how much the U.S. should pay for the war. People who voted to flatten Baghdad are now saying, um, they're not so sure anymore and won't fork over a penny to rebuild it until we buy some more textbooks for Little Jonny Al-Tikriti. Quite silly. Sad that I have to spell it out for you quite so explicitly, but here it is: one likes fighting War X because one agrees with the policy on principle. Whether it costs $87 billion or $187 billion and whether you might find other ways to spend the money (buying Stefan some foreign policy textbooks, for example) seems entirely beside the point.

even if i accept that you were talking solely about financial costs, which was not at all clear from your post, it's still a stupid-stick thing to say. i'll make it really simple. say i like fighting your war x, because by winning it i attain goal y, which purely as a hypothetical example we shall take to be a long term supply of cheaper oil. goal y must be worth something of positive value to me; but if by fighting war x i incur financial costs equal to or greater than the benefit of goal y, then prosecuting war x is a bad policy and is a mistake even though i would like to have goal y. so presuming you seek an end rather than means, are you saying that there is no financial cost the US should not bear to bring eye-raq under the heel of the nike jackboot?

now you may pretend goal y is in fact wolfowitzian blather about an island of democracy and stability blah blah, and that can has no price. but what if it was a trillion dollars, or a killion, even (apparently there is no number bigger than a killion), and even by spending it you are not sure you will attain your goal? you could fuck up your economy for nothing in return.

but perhaps your idea that there is absolutely no financial cost too high to fight a just war was merely a rhetorical flourish to prove a point. after all, you've still to prove that this was a just war. or perhaps you have a very poor grasp of economics and think the government can just print all the money it needs.

Yes, dear, perhaps. On a separate note, I'm still not sure why we're still having this rather irritating debate that does nothing but reprise debates of the last six months. Moveon.org, I say.

Eurof,
Saying the WMD issue was handled badly doesn't mean it wasn't a legitimate issue; one of several. I don't think it was right to hype it out of context, because that obviously leaves one open to charges of deceit. But even the UN reports agreed that Iraq did have a WMD programme, and there was an awful lot of stuff that is still unaccounted for.
In the cold light of hindsight it is now more likely that Saddam's ambitions were stymied, but not swayed. His own behaviour did nothing to allieviate international suspicions. And as the sanctions policy eroded it would have gotten easier, not harder, for Saddam to procure what he wanted. It just takes money and time, you know - look at N.Korea, which has dedicated its resources for years to the pursuit of a nuke, and now has one.
Maybe I'm a naive, easily manipulated American, but after 9/11 yeah, the idea of Saddam with WMD is scary. And maybe he wasn't in direct cahoots with Osama, but he was in plenty of cahoots with other shadowy figures.
Then of course there is the issue of oil. I am one of those nasty, mean, evil schemers who thinks that preserving a supply to oil is in the national interest. Moreover, Europe and Asia are freeriders on this. Getting the heck out of Saudi and creating a new client state in Iraq makes a lot of sense to me.
Last, the neo-con change-the-world approach. I believe this would work, if coupled by a more productive attitude toward Palestine, which seemed for a while to be in the cards. I have already talked about this.
If we re-wound the clock I'd still vote the same way. Am I happy with the outcome? Not entirely. There's a huge number of tunes that America should change. I'm all for more diplomacy and 'soft' power, and less for Texan gunslinging. I really dislike the Bush administration. But I think the case for war against Saddam holds.

Move on. Funny, Matthew. This is possibly the most important debate of the decade, because it is not often that we elect to wage a war without provocation. Perhaps it behooves us to revisit the issue every few months or so, see if there is progress in evaluating our initial positions. Initial positions wherein I remember you saying that if there are no WMDs in Iraq it would be a disaster.

Actually, I don't have to remember, I have it right here, courtesy of iChat's wonderful archive feature:

March 26, 2003, 2205 CET:

M: it will be a problem if it turns out he has none

M: many smart and otherwise trustworthy people will look very foolish

S: problem is too nice a word

M: indeed

M: actually, it will be a fucking disaster

Parse that.

Who knew iChat had an archive feature. I will from now on only talk to you on the phone. With a heavy heart, I will explain to you the difference, again.

You are right. Well, I mean, I was right. I also am right. It is a disaster that they haven't found WMDs. It's led to questions about GB's competence, the CIA's use of intelligence, and the rationale for the war. Much of this would be moot if the army had found a bottle of anthrax under a sand dune outside Tikrit. So, you're right. Politically, it's v. bad indeed.

But as others have suggested over and over and over, that only damages the legitimacy of the case for war if the sole justification was the existence, right now, of a pile of WMDs in some bunker. That was never the argument, both in terms of what how the Admin presented the case and certainly in what happen to be my personal opinion on the matter. Even Pollack, a Clinton analyst, made a compelling case for war unpredicated on the current manufacture or otherwise of WMDs.

So enough of this narrow and simplistic canard already. Obviously only a ninny would suggest the post-war has been ideal. A key reason is that the narrow public arguments (forced, by the way, because of the exigencies of the UN debate) have turned out so far to be wrong. But it's never been clear to me why that undermines the overall rationale, as already laid out by others (Leon, Jame) above.

Also, on the MoveOn comment, I'm not tired of the Iraq debate. I'm tired of having the Iraq debate with YOU. Neither of us will change our minds. Both of us accumulate new data to bolster our preconceptions. And it's a fundamentally unanswerable question right now as we're in possession of very few hard facts. It's also unerringly boring. Can't we invent some kind of macro to run through the inevitable debating terms without having to waste the time doing it?

S: There are no WMD's. Bush lied.
M: It doesn't matter. There were and are better rationales
S: You could have spent the money buying poor Pakistani kids X-Boxes.
M: Money isn't the issue.
S: Blah
M: Blah

There are more interesting questions to ask: Will WMD damage Bush in the elections? How are things really going in Iraq? Will the Yankees sign A-Rod?

Here's some evidence of how little we know. NYT quotes spy-agency director as saying that Iraq moved "illicit material" to Syria before the war. Is this true? Who knows? Even he doesn't. It's just a theory, but it's also a caution to you to tone down your defeatist rhetoric.

Thank you for clearly illustrating the problem with crying wolf. Why should we now believe a word of what is being said to support the administration's case? And even if you are capable of reading the tealeaves and entrails of US intelligence oracles, what should the lowly locals make of all this?

How much longer do you want to wait before we all agree there are no WMDs in Iraq? Don't you think somebody would have squealed by now for the millions of dollars on offer? Hell, I'll go plant some myself for that money.

i notice that matthew tends to want to "moveon.org" when he's losing an argument. he's happy clarting on when he thinks he's winning. he still hasn't satisfactorily enunciated what the rationales better than WMD were, and if they were better, why we had to bother with the WMD issue in the first place.

and by the by, changing each others' minds isn't the point here, rather the point is a battle for the minds of the 6 people who read this site; and if 5 have made up their minds already aqnd won't change, it's still worth going on about it to get the sixth.

what is astonishing to me is that re-reading the old memefirst links i seem to have developed my opposition to the war at a very late stage in the proceedings. i wish i could remember why.

doh! i'm agreeing with stefan's post again which i read after i posted the one just above. nor had i really noticed the astonishing admission by matthew above that.

hmmm. so now apparently we know "little"; "is this true?" you ask -- the link speaks of lots of traffic leaving iraq for syria just before the war, ie from a country just about to be violently invaded to a neutral one; how very unusual!! this must be unique in the annals of warfare! it must be WMDs, obviously.

it is pretty fucking stupid to go and invade someone and kill thousands of people when you know very little, when you are not sure what is true or not. and nothing you have written to date on this subject shows how bankrupt, distasteful and hollow your position is than this, what should be your last comment on this subject.

You are so dense. You are so dense. You make me so mad. This is me spluttering. And you, of all people, should see yourself in this line of thinking, for I am being Eurofianish. I know little. Me. As do you. And Stefan. I have broad sweeping thoughts about this stuff, which I surely don't need to repeat, but to clart on about whether or not there are or are not right now WMDs in evidence isn't material. It's really as simple as that. Jame says it well in some comment higher up, in Comment # 16.

No no no, you just commented!! Gaah. I have to go to bed.

It's like this: I agree that the WMD point is mostly a canard. I don't care about it, there are very probably none, and the coalition is either stupid or a bunch of liars; end of story. I don't understand the point you are trying to make in comment 20 though. Because people fled the country before the war taking things with them to syria, you believe it is an indication saddam MIGHT have had WMD?!? talk about cognitive dissonance and suspension of disbelief.

and Matthew, I knew Eurof, I grew up with him, and let me tell you, you are no Eurof: your conviction that it is impossible to prove saddam did NOT have WMD is unfalsifiable, therefore useless. But carry on using the word clart.

The burden of proof lies with those who care about the actual existence of WMDs, among whose numbers I count myself not.

May I just say that during this twenty-seven post exchange 'clart' moved from being a charming language idiosyncrasy of the Memefirst/StefanGeens weblog stable to a cliche, stygianizing that very same virtual edifice. And for little purpose. The rest of the content wasn't all that far from equine output, either.