ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE WAR!
I've been complaining for some time about the seeming absence of any effort by the anti-war crowd to present good honest arguments against the war, as opposed to just scoffing and sneering. Well, I found some arguments-- in The Onion, presented in a satirical remark about "things I should not be allowed to say about America."

Why do we purport to be fighting in the name of liberating the Iraqi people when we have no interest in violations of human rights—as evidenced by our habit of looking the other way when they occur in China, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Syria, Burma, Libya, and countless other countries? Why, of all the brutal regimes that regularly violate human rights, do we only intervene militarily in Iraq? Because the violation of human rights is not our true interest here. We just say it is as a convenient means of manipulating world opinion and making our cause seem more just.

That is exactly the sort of thing I should not say right now.

In answer to the question "Why Iraq?" I think the first response has to be a counter-question: "Are you asking that in good faith? Because there is a perfectly good answer, but most people who ask that question are doing it rhetorically, and are not really interesting in listening to the reply."

If someone is asking in good faith, the answer comes in several pieces. First of all, just because we don't prevent all human rights abuses everywhere doesn't mean we can't intervene in one place. It does not show that "the violation of human rights is not our true interest here." Second, Saddam's regime was arguably the worst of all the regimes listed there-- and "arguably" is good enough, for these purposes. I happen to think the arguments are convincing, that Saddam's regime was (by a wide margin) the worst of the regimes listed. But even if you think the situation is worse in Burma, that is no reason to doubt the administration's good-faith opinion that Saddam was the worst case. Third, human rights need not be the sole reason for our intervention. We might intervene because of Saddam's long record of atrocities and because of a potential terror threat, or his seeming possession of WMDs, or because it seemed militarily feasible, or because we wanted to initiate a trend towards democracy in the Middle East, and so on.

This also is not the time to ask whether diplomacy was ever given a chance.

Now why would anyone be inclined to make a statement so obviously false as this? For we all know that colossal efforts were made by the US and Britain to get UN Security Council approval for the war, and that only when it was clear that France would veto it did the US and the UK go forward; moreover, even then they had the diplomatic support of dozens of countries, painstakingly garnered in a year and half of diplomatic struggle after 9/11. Not only was diplomacy tried and tried and tried again, it was to a considerable extent successful.

So it is intriguing, let us say, that such a large proportion of our elite is content to delude itself into thinking that diplomacy was never given a chance. Even if we assume that many of those who say this (Kerry, for example) say so opportunistically in bad faith, many Europeans and Democrats somehow really believe this, and we need to understand the mentality which nurtures this strange view. I think Europeans and Democrats have a certain mystic faith that talking is the answer, that a penchant for debate, dialog, and consultation rather than action is what sets democracy apart from dictatorship. What is so offensive about the Iraq war is that their utopia of perpetual negotiation among the great and good was interrupted, and that history was made by working-class young men and their grit and courage, and not by the utterances of ultra-civilized political grandees in their conference chambers.

Or why, for the last 10 years, Iraq has been our sworn archenemy, when during the 15 years preceding it we traded freely in armaments and military aircraft with the evil and despotic Saddam Hussein. This is the kind of question that, while utterly valid, should not be posed right now.

By all means, critique the long involvement of the US with Saddam Hussein. Why doesn't the left do this? Rumsfeld is a guilty party from that era; wouldn't this make a nice line of attack against him? It would be a way of deflating the glorification of Reagan, which might be useful too.

I just hope no one is silly enough to see this as an argument against the war. It's an argument for the war: in Iraq, unlike in North Korea for example, we bore some of the blame for the Baathist regime, and we owed the Iraqi people liberation as compensation for the harms caused. This could be a great line of argument for the left in many other areas of foreign policy, if only the left would use it.

And I certainly will not point out our rapid loss of interest in the establishment of democracy in Afghanistan once our fighting in that country was over. We sure got out of that place in a hurry once it became clear that the problems were too complex to solve with cruise missiles. That sort of remark will simply have to wait until our boys are safely back home.

The "left" (so called) didn't want to go into Afghanistan in the first place. They wanted, that is, to leave it under the Taliban regime. Now, maybe you could construct a middle-ground argument like "Well, we shouldn't have gone in at all, but once we went in, we owed it to the Afghan people to help reconstruct the country; returning their country to chaos was irresponsible, the worst option." Well, I don't quite agree. I do think we should have put more troops in there, tried harder to make the peace work. Of course, if we did, we would have been accused loudly of imperialism; it wouldn't have been in the national interest; and it probably wouldn't have worked a whole lot better than what we did. I certainly think the Afghans are better off now than they were under the totalitarian Taliban. And Afghanistan was always a less likely prospect for democracy than Iraq. What's wrong with admitting that "cruise missiles" are our comparative advantage in a place like Afghanistan? Sometimes military intervention is useful, sometimes nation-building is useful, and sometimes nation-building is not really feasible.

Here's another question I won't ask right now: Could this entire situation have been avoided in the early 1990s had then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie not been given sub rosa instructions by the Bush Administration to soft-pedal a cruel dictator? Such a question would be tantamount to sedition while our country engages in bloody conflict. Just think how hurtful that would be to our military morale. I know I couldn't fight a war knowing that was the talk back home.

Once again, please critique Bush Administration I, and welcome to it. The father made a mistake in leaving Saddam Hussein in power, and it fell to the son to rectify that mistake. That's the whole point. We should have gone in earlier, by all means. But whenever we went in, we would have had similar problems to what we have now. George W. Bush and company weren't in power then, nor did we have the benefit of the display, in Afghanistan, of what the US military was capable of.

Is this, then, the appropriate time for me to ask if Operation Iraqi Freedom is an elaborate double-blind, sleight-of-hand misdirection ploy to con us out of inconvenient civil rights through Patriot Acts I and II? Should I wonder whether this war is just a means of distracting the country while its economy bucks and lurches toward the brink of a full-blown depression? No and no.

It is possible to argue Operation Iraqi Freedom as an "elaborate double-blind, sleight-of-hand misdirection ploy to con us out of inconvenient civil rights" or to "distract the country while its economy bucks and lurches towards the brink of a full-blown depression." Some people for some reason find such arguments clever. But, being honest for a moment here, are they plausible? After 9/11, did the Bush Administration really need another excuse if it wanted to curtail civil rights? Didn't the war in Iraq create divisions which undermined the consensus behind the Patriot Acts? Besides, what restrictions of civil rights? The opposition to the administration in the media now is certainly stronger than it has ever been in my lifetime. A full-blown depression? But that's complete baloney: the economy suffered only a mild recession and has been recovering for two years, and in the past few months has been growing very fast. Besides, the war did not take attention away from the economy. And it probably created a climate of fear which stalled the recovery.

What is clear is that a brutal dictator was toppled and Iraqis are now much freer than they have been in decades; and the regime that was considered, throughout the 1990s, one of the most dangerous regimes in the world is now gone. So we can believe that 1) Bush had bad intentions, and embarked on the war as a Machiavellian but totally incompetent gamble for electoral advantage back home, yet while the scheme backfired with respect to domestic politics, he did a lot of good for Iraqis and the world, or 2) Bush had good intentions, to spread freedom and neutralize a threat, just like he said, and is on his way to achieving them, though he paid a large political price for his courage.

The difference between the two views involves Bush's state of mind. In a way, it doesn't matter. If the leftists are right, and if Bush is actually an incompetent Machiavellian whose self-seeking pursuits backfire on him, but have a lot of beneficial side-effects, I'll still vote for him. But I don't find this story plausible.

I think it's high time that the leftists stop trying to be clever. When satire is a way to avoid an honest argument in which you can't hold your own, it soon begins to seem hollow.

Meanwhile, I know I've made the case for war before. I think it just needs to be repeated ad nauseam. Bush needs to make the case more strongly too. The public still doesn't get it.