The Wrong Reasons
The inestimable Lileks whittles the issue down to a nub:
Imagine if you woke from an operation and discovered that your tumor was gone. You'd think: I suppose that's a good thing. But. You learned that the hospital might profit from the operation. You learned that the doctor who made the diagnosis had decided to ignore all the other doctors who believed the tumor could be discouraged if everyone protested the tumor in the strongest possible terms, and urged the tumor to relent. How would you feel? You'd be mad. You'd look up at the ceiling of your room and nurse your fury until you came to truly hate that butcher. And when he came by to see how you were doing, you'd have only one logical, sensible thing to say: YOU TOOK IT OUT FOR THE WRONG REASONS. PUT IT BACK!
Read the whole thing, it's very nearly a screed.
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Yeah, but a few thousand
Yeah, but a few thousand morons ain't worth the trouble. Saddam's not coming back.
I do have to ask, though. Is a dude who carries a sign that reads "I (HEART) NY even more without the world trade center" terminally crass and stupid, or actually evil? Cuz there's a line to cross somewhere.
If he didn't cross the line,
If he didn't cross the line, he's skating perilously close to it.
So what you're saying is it's
So what you're saying is it's OK to lie about acts and intentions, as long as there is some sort of discernable purpose.
Sure, removing Hussein for humanitarian reasons is a positive act. Keep in mind that between the two wars America has killed a very large number of Iraqi civilians. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, I suppose.
In a democracy we DISCUSS the possible, positive acts; we debate them, we decide on a course of action through democractic consensus.
We don't lie about WHY we want to do something, how much it's going to cost, our expectations, and so forth. It defeats democracy.
This administration does it, at will.
That's not the point. If our
That's not the point. If our intelligence (and, in fact, that of the rest of the world including France and the UN) was wrong on the existence of WMDs, it does not invalidate the other reasons for going to war, and it does not mean that liberating Iraq was a bad thing. You do that in your comment: "removing Hussein for humanitarian reasons is a positive act." How about, "removing Hussein was a good thing, period."
And we did discuss the war, for months, and our (well, not your) elected representatives voted to authorize the actions that our President took. All based on the best intelligence *we had at the time.*
What exactly is your problem with this sequence of events, other than that democratic consensus didn't agree with you? Is it so surprising that a large majority of Americans and their representatives came to a different conclusion, that you must come up with a dark plot by nefarious schemers to explain why so many people think you're wrong? "There's no way they could disagree with the enlightened opinion I posess, the masses must have been lied to, duped, in order for them to hold the ridiculous belief that getting rid of Saddam is a good idea."