This is inane, even by Drum standards. If you launch a preemptive war when there is nothing to preempt, then it is a failure from the get-go. That's why the war's opponents wre right from the start.

I opposed the war from mid-2002 when it became apparent that Bush had to have his vanity war. But I shouldn't count as "ordinary" because I was talking to intel people, not reading pundits.

How about opposing the war because it took money and resources from a more important goal: finding the 9/11 perpetrators and bringing them to justice.

Bob: That's an argument about WMD. But what if Saddam really did have WMD? Then would there have been something to preempt?

Blue Girl: But what were your intel folks telling you?

Just a general comment here: There were lots of reasons for opposing the war. In this post, I'm only reponding to the particular argument that Atrios made.

Vincent reminds us of the issue as we need to frame it: Afghanistan is being lost because of Bush's relentless pursuit of a vanity war.

Gotta go with Bob N.

Look at who the media had represent the anti-war side back then: Jeanine G. [sp]

And the media protect their own even today, no matter their track record.

Being right on basically everything is what has doomed Al Gore to being on the Board of Apple, Inc.

I think Daniel Davies made the point best IIRC it went like this, "Good ideas don't need to be sold with lies."

Preemption is a very bad basis for war unless you can be sure no one else will follow your example. Therefore, it shouldn't be done unless you are damn sure of the risk posed by the country you are planning to make war on. But from the beginning, the evidence about Iraq was questionable. Colin Powell almost had me sold, but many of the lines of evidence he put forward unraveled quickly. Most importantly, after all the time put in by inspectors, it became clear that either the WMDs did not exist or IRAQ was the David Copperfield of nations. That was my basis, and I believe I was lead there by commentary I read, though I can't now site any specifics.

Different people opposed the war for different reasons. The reason I opposed it was not for questions of principle (pre-emptive/non-pre-emptive) but because the war did not survive a cost-risk/benefit analysis. If hawks today say, hey, we have to use the information we had available at the time, I'm fine with that. But their case is still thin. We KNEW (or should have known) about the risks of a Sunni-Shiite conflict. We KNEW (or should have known) about the near certainty that our presence would attract jihadist elements. We KNEW (or should have known) that the risk factors for a functioning democracy in Iraq were bad. The truth is, the hawks didn't do a careful cost-risk/benefit analysis. They were thinking: “if we go over there and kick some Arab ass they are going to think twice about messing with us again.�

My objections were:
(a) In 2002, Bush seemed to be hyping the threat deliberately to start the war ( I didn't think Iraq posed a threat to us).
(b) I thought the most likely outcome would be a failed state, with sectarian strife.

Kevin wrote: "I wish my memory were more detailed about what anti-war liberals were saying back in 2002, but it's not."

Here is what Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich, who led the House opposition to the authorization for Bush to "use military force" against Iraq, said in November 2002:

Unilateral military action by the United States against Iraq is unjustified, unwarranted, and illegal. The Administration has failed to make the case that Iraq poses an imminent threat to the United States. There is no credible evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. There is no credible evidence linking Iraq to Al Qaeda. Nor is there any credible evidence that Iraq possesses deliverable weapons of mass destruction, or that it intends to deliver them against the United States.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

The purpose of the war is to provide security to America and its allies and to spread democracy in the middle east. Liberals don't get respect because they oppose those objectives.

I don't have a blog but I opposed the war from the beginning for a variety of reasons all of which have been illustrated in recent years.
1. While Saddam might have had some WMD's I didn't think he was a threat to the US and in any case we should have continued the searches.
2. A preemptive strike like this violates International Law and thus only support from the UN could really justify it.
3. I thought that an invasion would mainly serve to inflame tensions in the middle east and undermine our ability to control terrorism.
4. I thought trying to impose order and a stable govt on Iraq--a country with vast underlying ethnic and religious tensions would not work and Iraq did not have a political culture likely to sustain the development of democratic impulses.

While such sentiments where hard to find in the mainstream press I certainly remember reading others who shared these concerns.

Kevin: I knew some (the unclassified parts) of what was in Desert Crossing. That war-game report they feared falling into competent hands.

Well, pre-emption is generally judged to be bad in international law, and there was no reason to pre-empt in 2003 since we were not under threat. Gaddis et al point to previous presidential pre-emptions, but that doesn't mean it is necessary or profitable.

There was substantial info about the weakness of Saddam's weapons before the invasion. Joseph Cirincione was one of those arguing this.

There was ample evidence of inflated beliefs about what we would achieve (e.g. the belief that democracies don't attack democracies).

And there were the inspectors, whom we got into Iraq but had to leave in March '03: Saddam did not kick them out.

So there were sound arguments for not invading. But the nation was traumatized and panicked, and too many went along, including some of my favorite Democratic bloggers in DC. The Brookings crew did not help at all. At the American Political Science Association meetings last fall, someone said in plenary session that noone at Brookings had opposed the invasion. Noone objected. Democratic interventionists bear a substantial amount of responsibility for this disaster.

I taught at the institution where Leslie Gelb did. I started in '65 and he left in '66. Around '69 someone in his department said, "Hey, Les Gelb's come out against the war. But not for the reasons YOU guys did." So the liberal hawks have good company. I think both McNamara and Chalmers Johnson have admitted they were misled, not by anything anyone told them, but by their cold war mentality, and they were wrong. O'Hanlon and Pollack seem to have similar mentality problems.

Kevin, note that your whole take pre-emption is, "does it work"? As we've seen, it often does not. But that's not the only reason to avoid pre-empting.

Dan Tompkins

What about the notion that us anti-war folk opposed warmongering in general and had an absolute (and well-founded) distrust of this particular president? It's not like we needed to have predicted the specifics of a botched occupation to be right on that regard.

I must jump in here. I opposed the war because,I, with no more resources than a computer and a cable modem, was able to determine that stories like Atta in Prague, Aluminium tubes, links to Al Queda were so much bullshit. I sat appalled while I watched Bin Laden morph into Hussain and Afganistan morph into Iraq. The policy was built on lies and was wrong morally. The fact that it turned to shit simply compounds the crime.

As someone who opposed the war precisely because of the lack of international endorsement from the U.N. and its diversionary impact on the War on Terror, I have to admit I always assumed Saddam had WMD's. I just thought that the best way to deal with the problem was through continued monitoring and sanctions, not militarization. Had the U.N. been involved from the start, and even approved the venture, it is less likely the subsequent fiasco would have occurred. I still would have opposed the war, but the outcome would certainly be preferable to the clusterf**k today.

Well, let's try that link again:

Desert Crossing

It captures it for me. I was highly skeptical of the WMD claim and in no way convinced even if there were some stockpiles they were any immediate threat to the U.S. On top of that, I never once bought the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. In short, the whole thing smelled to me and pre-emption has never been a justifiable idea to me.

I did not write anything about it, so its not like my thoughts suit the evidence Kevin seeks, but I know I was not alone in feeling that way.

Now, I had no proof to back me up. However, it is a silly game to say those whose intuition was right deserve no respect. Then people's whose intuition is for shit do? Nonsense.

It is on the face of it silly to say those who opposed the war are not worth listening too because ultimately why it sucks was not forseen, like only seers with second sight who predict exactly deserve respect. If that is the case, no one deserves to be listened to ever.

Bottom line: had antiwar voices been listened too, even if the precise reasons don't fit today's hellhole, we would not be in this mess. And that is vastly better.

Prowar liberals who cannot come to terms with it need to face facts: people who are skeptical of war are wise to be skeptical. Wars of opportunity should never be fought.

Total BS! Everyone who wanted to know, who had the ability to read knew this was going to end up in a cluster fuck....but nobody wanted to "listen!"cj

And the shame of it is that Kucinich was -- and still is -- held up as a crackpot not only by the right, but by folks who consider themselves mainstream. The man has been right more often, and about more important things, than any 10 people who appear regularly on the Sunday morning programs.

Read Zbgniew Brezinski.

He has the best explanation for why the Iraq fiasco was doomed to begin with, and why whether Bush surges, purges or urges, he will either lose the war or leave it to the next occupant of the White House to lose it.

Of course preemptive war is wrong -- how can you even argue the point?

The concept of preemptive war is NOT that you attack someone because you are heading off being attacked yourself. That is still self-defense.

Preemptive war is attacking someone because YOU THINK they may attack you. No troops are aligned against you, no weapons or motivation is apparent, you simply BELIEVE you may be attacked.

Think about it: if there are troops lined up at the border, or threats are being made publicly against you, you can obviously respond. In war, attacking can be a good defense.

But Bush, and the vast majority of Americans, including (sadly) many liberals who should have known better, supported a war based on Bush's words -- no troops were on our border, no weapons were found, no motivation was obvious -- Saddam did not declare war or threaten the U.S. in any obvious way. Yet millions of American approved of an unprovoked attack on another nation.

It was a crime. It is a crime.

But the worst of it is that America has learned nothing from this experience. Already there are those who say that the war was wrong because Bush lied (duh), or there should have been more troops, or some sort of after war plan (yeah, Hitler had an after war plan, I guess that makes it OK, huh?).

So-called liberal hawks don't agree with other liberals because they still believe that it is right for the U.S. to act outside of the rule of law -- and many non-hawks sit around arguing with them. At some point these people need to look at what kind of world they are creating.

Dan: I agree. As I mentioned, the arguments for and against preemption are pretty much the same now as they were four years ago. And they're as much moral as pragmatic. I just don't think Iraq really advances those arguments one way or another.

The idea that there was one "primary critique" is pretty much a straw man. There were multiple reasons to think the war would go worse than the administration said it would and that not fighting the war would go better than the administration said it would.

"The fact that Iraq is a clusterfuck doesn't demonstrate that preemptive war is wrong..."

Not entirely, perhaps, but Iraq is obviously evidence for the argument that preemptive wars are often unnecessary wars, particularly when the evidence that you are preempting anything at all is constantly crumbling before even cursory analysis (aluminum tubes, uranium from niger, meetings that never happened, etc).

It is also evidence for the argument that medium sized wars that deep down nobody thinks are really necessary are fought in a halfhearted way unlikely to succede. If iraq really was as important as Bush tried to convince people that it was he wouldn't have tried to do it on the cheap. The fact that the evidence in support of the war was so weak meant that support for it was similarly weak so the effort made in the war was weak. Very few people were willing to sacrifice anything for this war. Integral to the sales job was the promise that it would be so easy that no sacrifice from its constituency would be necessary.

It's not just international support, it is also domestic support.

"Iraq didn't fail because it was preemptive..."

Sure it did. A definition of a successful preemptive war would have to be that it prevented something bad from happening. It has now been proven that, as many were convinced before the war, nothing bad was going to happen. Saddam didn't have useful WMD's and wasn't going to get them soon. He wasn't even really trying to get them anymore. The war itself has to be regarded as a cost and whatever bad thing was going to be prevented would be the benefit. As nothing bad was going to happen nothing was prevented and all we have is the cost.

If I cut off my arm to prevent gangrene spreading from my hand, but it turns out i just misinterpreted some newspaper ink stains my amputation was a pretty greivous failure.

My recollection from the time was that there was much made of a book by that Pollack character that gave credence (on our side of the fence, anyway) to the notion that Iraqi nukes were on the way. Bush himself was relentlessly pushing the "Saddam must disarm" line. The idea that Saddam might be close to getting nukes was the one halfway compelling argument for war. Without it, the rest of the pro-war arguments pretty much dissolved.

I recall telling myself that removing Saddam might not be a bad idea, but I didn't trust this batch of jokers to do it. Then I told myself that was too glib, and I ought to be more "serious" about the whole thing. My earlier "glib" reaction was right on the money.

There's a beneath the surface crisis of legitimacy in the U.S. political establishment right now, given that most of it at least tacitly supported the war at the beginning. Now that the enterprise has gone terrifically bad, there's a real question of why most of those in power deserve to be there. When I see these people talking to each other on the teevee, there's this prevailing unreality as they all pretend the war isn't lost and that the administration isn't a criminal rogue presidency. They can't admit to these obvious truths as doing so would threaten all their meal tickets - after all why listen to such a bunch of jackasses if they were responsible for this catastrophe?.

I think the whole stinking edifice will eventually crumble, perhaps rather quickly and unexpectedly, much as the old Soviet Union did. Until it does, we'll see this same pattern of all the bozohawks protecting each other by being as stupid and dishonest as necessary to avoid facing the truth.

It was obvious to anyone who could read that Iraq was not a threat. It was obvious to a blind man after 9/11 that Bush was going to find any excuse to start a war and that nothing was going to stop him.

The moral shilly-shallying that is being practiced by those dancing around this despicable debate is nothing less than disgraceful. And that includes almost every nationally prominent politician and all but a very few commentators.

The invasion and subsequent occupation was, and is, wrong and can never be made right. And it has been made several orders of magnitude worse by the unbelievably mendacious way the Bush Administration has pretended that they have any interest in bringing anything positive to Iraq (but Iraq, of course, should feel grateful).

The only person I know who can express satisfactorily the depths of anger, disorientation and sadness that I feel is Arthur Silber (http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com). I think he coined the term "narcissistic jingoism" to sum up all the self-righteous smugness that most in the U.S. feel about the good intentions the country (supposedly) brought to Iraq and the anguish about all the blood and treasure expended by the U.S.

What about all the death and destruction heaped on Iraq? Why isn't that the constant question?

War should always be the absolute LAST resort to any conflict. This is not a radical view, but somehow during this time period, we (the anti-war left) were treated as batshit insane because we felt that all other options for "dealing" with Saddam had not been exhausted. This worldview will ALWAYS be right, and the view that war is a legitimate foreign policy tool to be utilized as one would utilize diplomacy is so fucking absurd it boggles the mind.

I personally opposed the war because it was clear no matter how you looked at it, that war was being pushed not as a last resort and a failure of diplomacy, but as the preferred policy of a group of powerful nutbags.

Iraq was an aggressive war. There was nothing to prevent.

I opposed the war because I did not trust Bush to be truthful about the reasons for the war.

It was clear during the 2002 election campaign that he saw this warmongering as the perfect opportunity to prop himself as the war President and to paint Democrats as weak on national security, the latter contrary to all available evidence.

Well, I will tell you what I wrote my 3 congressmen in 2002: that there was no evidence to back up the Administration's claims. And that if the United States invaded Iraq, we would touch off an internal sectarian war that I didn't see any signs of being prepared to handle.

Oops, guess I was right at least.

In any case, what is the liberal hawks argument? That since they were /wrong/ for wrong reasons, they are in a better position than people who were right for the wrong reasons? Seems to me that the hawks were both wrong and unlucky, which is worse than being wrong and lucky in my book.

Cranky

First of all, let's clear up some terminology. Pre-emptive war is when you attack someone who is about to attack you. Preventive war is when you attack someone who could attack you at some point in the near or not-so-near future. We waged a preventive war, which international law does not accept to be anything different than an illegal war of aggression. I understand that the terms pre-emptive and preventive are merely two different points on a scale, but in the philosophy of war and politics they mean two different things, and we ought to be clear about that.

If I had believed that Saddam was about to launch an attack on us, thus making our war pre-emptive, I would have supported it. He was not, and therefore I did not. Even if one accepted that he had WMD, he was in no position to threaten us with them, which is the necessary requirement for a legal pre-emptive war to be waged. I was opposed to our war because by the standards of international law it was a war of aggression and thus illegal and immoral, and I opposed it whether or not Saddam had WMDs or not, because I was not convinced that he was about to use them on us. Even if we had found the WMDs, the war would STILL have been illegal unless we found some evidence that Saddam was about to order an imminent attack on us or our interests overseas.

Secondly, I didn't trust the administration not to use this war for their own purposes. I think the events of 2002 gave us plenty of evidence that we could not trust this administration to act solely in the best interests of the nation, or to even know what that meant.

And lastly, I did not predict that Iraq would dissolve into an atrocious civil war. I did however predict that the Iraqis would not be as happy to be invaded as those idiots on the right thought they would be, and I also warned people that I spoke to about my opposition that wars are not something you can keep control over. If you kick over a brutally repressive government, you do not know what will emerge in it's place.

I do not think there is some sort of requirement that the anti-invasion crowd have to have predicted the exact consequences of this war to have been right about it. It was right to be opposed to it even if the consequences turned out favorably to us and the Iraqis, because it was an illegal war of aggression in the first place. And it was right to be opposed to in general on the suspicion that the occupation would not go as well as hoped, and that the Bush administration would manage the occupation as badly as feared.

Yes, by those standards the only people who don't get credit are the ones who oppose all wars, all the time. But even in that case it's still difficult to argue with someone who's right, even if they got to their conclusion the wrong way. Fact is, if we had listened only to the anti-war all the time crowd, wouldn't we nonetheless be better off? The answer is, unquestionably, yes.

After all, Iraq didn't fail because it was preemptive

It failed because it was an exercise in empire-building, rather than nation building. Moreover, it was an exercise in building a 19th-century empire. I'm surprised we didn't send our troops in on horseback, armed with swords and gatling guns.

Part of the anti-war left (the MoveOn wing, for instance) was not only anti-Gulf War II (Operation Iraqi Freedom), but also anti the Afghanistan/Taliban removal war (Operation Enduring Freedom). The anti-Afghanistan War position, for any centrist, is not worthy of respect. And of course the majority of Democrats are unfairly depicted as being part of the fringe left.

I am loathe to be more specific than to say I knew mid-grade officers, Captains and Majors mostly, who had the uncomfortable feeling that the intel they were gathering was being cherry-picked and spun.

"Bob: That's an argument about WMD. But what if Saddam really did have WMD? Then would there have been something to preempt?"

That's baloney. Of course it matters if the reason for preemption was real or false.

Yea, if there had been WMD's you'd be one step on the way to knowing that you successfully preempted something (still not 100% because there wasn't any real reason to think saddam would use any WMD's he did have or could immenently have come to have against the US any time soon, and if he had had them they might have been used because of the war), but since he did not have any useful WMD's (even loosely defined to encompass usable chemical weapons or active weapons programs making meaningfull progress) we can be certain that we preempted nothing.

In short we are spending on the order of $1,000,000,000,000 and have set off a war which is heading toward killing a million people to not prevent an attack.

That's failure.

It would work exactly the same way with a defensive war, or an explicit war of conquest. If we invaded canada in response to pearl harbor that would be an automatic failure. If we invaded greenland to secure the strategically important sugar cane industry it would be an automatic failure.

Invading Iraq to prevent an immenent WMD attack on the US was an automatic failure.

I participated in two marches against the war prior to the actual commencement of hostilities. My motivating factors were 1.) an inherent belief that any administration, and especially this one, was more than willing to distort facts to line up with their political motivations (said as a Vietnam-era activist who felt the same about the Johnson administration) 2) a logical progression from the question of primary strategic rationale for the war which led me to a conclusion of a dual factor: establishing the unquestioned primacy of the US in the world arena and securing greater control in the distribution and pricing of the world oil supply, key to our current economy. I felt strongly for months preceding actual hostilities that the US was gaming the UN in a way that was both obvious and destined for success, given decades of preparatory work establishing the UN as an organization leaning strongly towards obstruction of US positions based on a believable (to US interests) desire for some form of comeuppance to US power and positions.

This is an all-too-common case of Kevin relying only on the work of other bloggers. Prominent anti-war non-blogging liberals: Tony Judt, Al Gore, Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, James Fallows, Anatol Leiven, Timothy Garton Ash, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth Waltz, etc. These individuals opposed the war from the get-go, and in terms 1000X more eloquent than any blogger. Kevin ignores it just cuz he's so focused on the blogosphere.

I once knew a liberal hawk who refused treatment for cancer because the doctor who diagnosed it could not tell him the exact reason for the diagnosis. For obvious reasons, the aforementioned liberal hawk does not exist anymore.

Kevin, first of all -- and not solely to mince words or split hairs -- when are people going to stop calling the American military presence in Iraq a "war"?

Secondly, what I remember as the chief reason why most anti-war folks were against the invasion -- and why I was against it: Iraq was clearly not a threat to Americans, especially not with the American and British boot on its neck with the northern and southern no-fly zones for 11 years. Iraq was a toothless and clawless lion. As for the WMDs . . . Saddam didn't have the money or the resources thanks to post-1991 sanctions (and, in retrospect, in spite of the Oil-for-Food scandal).

As for the failure of the continued presence in Iraq, that's simple. Nation-building in our own image -- which is the sole reason Bush went into Iraq, per the authority of House Joint Resolution 114 (2002) and House Concurrent Resolution 104 (2003), both of which affirmed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, signed by Clinton -- requires the will of the conquered.

The key point is legitimacy, something which means other countries will help you, along with many within the country being invaded. The U.N. signing off would be indicative of legitimacy, but not the cause of it. The U.N. could, in theory, sign off on an illigitimate war. In this case it didn't.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a long-planned war of unprovoked aggression. There was no threat to "preempt".

Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell etc. knew this very well.

They spent an entire year lying to the American people, the United States Congress, the United Nations Security Council and the entire world about what they knew to be a nonexistent "threat" from nonexistent "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" and nonexistent "links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda" in order to justify a corrupt war of unprovoked aggression for the purpose of seizing control of Iraq's vast oil reserves for their cronies and financial backers in the US-based multinational oil companies.

Arguments about the legitimacy of actual "preemptive war" -- where a nation acts in self defense to preempt an actual imminent attack -- are irrelevant.

What is relevant is that Dick Cheney and his gang of career war profiteers from the military-industrial-petroleum complex had planned to invade Iraq and seize control of its oil reserves for years before Cheney seized power in the stolen election of 2000, and from the moment they took over the White House they were focused on how to pull it off.

As it happened, in September 2001 they got the "new Pearl Harbor" that the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) had written, years earlier, would be needed to persuade the American public to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and they took full advantage of it.

They are a gang of criminals masquerading as "conservative" or "neo-conservative" politicians in order to dupe enough weak-minded gullible rubes to vote for them that they could get close enough to steal an election, nothing more and nothing less.

Personally, I knew how blithely he had sent people to their deaths, deliberately and one by one, with the stroke of his pen and nary a moment of reflection. I knew how he mocked Karla Faye Tucker. I could see his pathologies manifesting a decade ago and I know I wasn't alone.

Who the fuck didn't see him then as the megalomaniacal war-monger he turned out to be?

I am not apologizing for being right.

If you can't remember what the arguments against the war were, try this: what did the war's supporters gloat about in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad?

1) Welcomed as liberators
2) No uprising on the "Arab street"
3) No mass exodus of refugees
4) Not a quagmire

Here is why Brent Scowcroft was against the war (writing in the Wall Street Journal 15 August 2002):

"But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. So long as that sentiment persists, it would require the U.S. to pursue a virtual go-it-alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive. The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism. Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence."

I was against the war because

(1) In general, war is such a destructive unpredictable enterprise, it should never be chosen except in cases of self defense in response to humanitarian crises. This is something I thought should be self evident; it's very sad we still haven't learned this lesson.

(2) It was clear that as ruthless as he was, there were plenty of people in Iraq who benefited from Saddam's rule and who would fight against us if we over threw him. I figured that if we invaded, we'd be in the horrific position where people would be arguing, well we can't leave now because that will be a disaster, but it wouldn't be clear our staying would help.

(3) Experts on the area at the time were comparing Iraq to a beam under pressure. There were tremendous sectarian pressures that Saddam's brutal dictatorship was keeping in check. They warned that it would take skill to make the transition to a new government without a break down and possibly civil war. The Bush administration had shown itself to be completely incompetent.

(4) As in Vietnam, I expected that the pressure of having troops in a foreign land getting shot at for a dubious cause where it wasn't clear who the enemy was would lead to atrocities that would tarnish our reputation. I didn't expect the sort of sexual abuse of Abu Ghraib though.

(5) The administration was clearly acting in bad faith. By the time we had invaded, it was clear they were seeking for excuses to invade; aluminum tubes had already been shown to be bunk. We should only go to war after an honest discussion of why we're doing it.

(6) I feared that getting caught in a quagmire in Iraq would remove resources (both military and diplomatic) that were needed to address North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. I was frightened in particular that North Korea would be allowed to keep developing nuclear weapons.

I'll just add, when we invaded, I had a horrible sick feeling in the pit of my gut. It's the kind of feeling you have in a nightmare, where there's a monster in the closet, and those you know and love are smiling and insisting on opening the closet, and you know what's going to happen when they do.

As for reputation, I don't think liberals who opposed the war in advance should be feted as foreign policy geniuses, because it was fairly obvious from the beginning the fiasco this was likely to develop into; it didn't take any genius to see it.

On the other hand, I do think people who supported the war ought to be a lot more embarrassed than they seem to be. After all, if I'd been wrong, if the occupation went smoothly, if the current government in Iraq was stable, friendly to the U.S., if our reputation was strengthened, if the Middle East peace process was helped, if we'd discovered weapons of mass destruction, I would give up politics and foreign affairs. I would figure, I obviously don't know a thing; I was sure Iraq would be a disaster, and the reasons we were being told we had to invade were a bill of goods. If I'd been that wrong, I'd happily give up politics, and pursue subjects I have some competence in. But now that the opposite has happened, now that the invasion that was supposed to have protected us and burnished are reputation has turned into the biggest foreign policy disaster we may have ever had, the people who pushed this policy don't seem particularly humbled. They're still in positions of power, still making decisions. This is terrifying, because things aren't as they could be; they could easily get worse if we don't learn from our mistakes. I'm just praying we don't go to war with Iran.

--Rick Taylor

Preemptive? Preventive? What utter bullshit. Sure that's the way it was sold to the American people, but many, including myself, never bought that.

This was a war of choice that didn't need to occur, period. Forget the reasons for why it strategically failed (ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, etc.), it was wrong because it was unnecessary.

Unnecessary wars are always wrong.

"The purpose of the war is to provide security to America and its allies and to spread democracy in the middle east. Liberals don't get respect because they oppose those objectives."
That is true, in the fantasy world you live in, Al.

I opposed the war for the following reasons:

1) that if there were any WMD, it was well bottled up. The UN inspectors didn't find them, just for example.

2) I couldn't figure out how the hell it was supposed to play out, what with the possibility of conflict between Turkey and the Kurds, and the fact that Shiites were (and still are) the majority. Iran gaining influence in the region is no surprise at all. What I had not realized, what occurred to me earlier just this week, is that right now the next Osama is probably in his teens or twenties in Saudi Arabia, watching the Sunnis in Iraq most likely get the very short end of the stick. These botched executions don't help.

3) Bush was too clearly not-quite-lying his way into the war. If you look at some of the speeches (at least one of them quoted in Neil Young's "Let's Impeach the President") the sentences are carefully constructed -- Clintonesque, if you will -- to give the impression that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, but if read carefully, you notice that it doesn't exactly say that. This was a total red flag for me -- why would he not state the involvement explicitly and declaratively, unless, perhaps, he didn't truly believe it? (Note that Cheney just lies, flat-out, about Atta meeting Iraqi agents in Czechoslovakia. This is more likely to fool me that Bush's carefully constructed non-statements).

4) I have a general bias against "trust me" coming from the government. Something this serious, you cannot say "let's go to war" (at likely cost of hundreds, actually thousands, of soldiers) but also "we cannot compromise our sources" (a few dozen, at most, probably not citizens, probably not as loyal to the US as our soldiers. And, it turned out, our sources were either nonexistent or shit). Sorry, if you cannot compromise sources, I don't think we need to compromise soldiers. There's cases where the sources matter more -- I'm thinking of the cold war, and WW2 -- but this was not one of them.

5) Without clearing our shiny new doctrine with the rest of the world, starting this war is most likely an actual war crime. Just another shrill liberal, that's me, but the law's the law, and we're a big country, and we can in fact take a punch before hitting back. As horrible as 9/11 was, several times that number die each year in various stupid ways -- from drunk driving, from suicide, just for example.

The Iraq war was neither preemptive nor preventive. It was pretextual.

"I once knew a liberal hawk who refused treatment for cancer because the doctor who diagnosed it could not tell him the exact reason for the diagnosis. For obvious reasons, the aforementioned liberal hawk does not exist anymore."
This is a valid analogy, in the fantasy world you live in, gregor.

Who trusted the likes of Richard Perle and other unsavory figures from the Iran Contra and the leftovers from the Nixon Watergate era to have the best interests of our country as the their top priority? Add to it the President's blatant falsehood that Saddam ordered the UN inspectors to leave Iraq in 2002.

It was clear from the beginning that this whole thing was a big Enron like scam. I never felt the need to think any deeper than this to conclude that the Iraq fiasco was going to be exactly that.

If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don't get more respect? Here's the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It's because they don't deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of.

The "doves" (I don't know that those of us who opposed this war but had advocated, at the time, that the First Gulf War ought to have as its overt aim the unconditional surrender of Iraq with a WWII-style war crimes trial, occupation, and reconstruction of Iraq by the victors really count as "doves") pointed to a wide array of reasons for concern about the war, from the moral to the practical. The truth of some of those are independent of the results of this war, the truth of some of them (such as the overstatement of the administration of its justifications particularly as regards WMD) have been borne out unambiguously, and some of them are consistent with the results but not clearly demonstrated by them (such as that the lack of international support and the lack of provocation made it, moral concerns aside, unlikely that the US could succeed, even if it could have without those factors which was doubtful, with the kind of limited costs the warfloggers were suggesting.)

As to Atrios point to rejection of "preemptive" war, this is perhaps how many phrased it, but is not quite technically correct in historical context.

Very few people rejected the idea of "preemptive" war, as that is historically understood. The anti-war left extended Bush's expansion of the idea of preemptive war (which previously referred to war in response to a specific, imminent threat that has not yet materialized into an actual accomplished attack) to include what others have labelled "preventive" war, that is war in response to nonspecific threat that may or may not materialize in the future.

Atrios also leaves out the very common pre-war refrain on the anti-war left that, even aside from the question of justification, the administration was underselling the costs and duration of the war as much as it was overselling the provocation, and consequently that the costs on both sides, if the war "succeeded" at all, would be far out of proportion to any good that might be done.

If this really was the primary critique among the anti-war left, has the Iraq war vindicated them?

First, I don't think its true that there was one clearly identifiable "primary" flaw in the case for war that the anti-this-war left coalesced around. There were myriad challenges, often articulated in long litanies, each of which was often presented as reason enough alone to reject the war. Second, the critique that Atrios points to (at least, as you relate it) isn't really one that can be "vindicated" by facts, it is a deontological critique, not a utilitarian one. OTOH, I suppose you could recast it into a utilitarian argument, in which case, with revision along the lines I suggest above to accurately reflect the dominant critique—the rejection of preventive war vs. that of preemptive war—I think that the present results are consistent with it, but not necessarily dispositive.

To wit, one might (I think I saw and perhaps even made this argument before the war, but I'm not really sure) flesh out a utilitarian argument that, in a war without provocation, it will be very difficult for the aggressor, if they are initially victorious, to do the kind of value transformation that the US proposed, because the perceived moral situation will be very different than with the defeat of a clearly aggressive regime by a nation or group of nations acting in response to aggression. Such an argument would be supported by the conditions that have actually resulted, though of course its impossible to make say that the lack of provocation is a "but for" cause of the failure.

After all, Iraq didn't fail because it was preemptive (though that didn't help);

I don't think that's clear (replacing, again, "preemptive" with "preventive".) It certainly isn't the only factor tending toward failure; I'm tempted to say it is a sufficient but not indispensable cause of failure.

it failed either because George Bush is incompetent or because militarized nation building is doomed to failure no matter who does it.

It certainly is possible that the latter contributed to failure, but "militarized nation building", has, in fact, often succeeded, and may even be the primary way nations get built, so the second proposal isn't even credible. But even if Bush's incompetence is such that it was sufficient for failure, that doesn't demonstrate that the context of the war didn't guarantee or strongly weigh in favor of failure no matter who was in charge.

Preemption per se had very little to do with it

I would agree, but, again, only because preemption is the wrong issue. Prevention, OTOH, I would argue may well have had quite a bit to do with it, because with prevention—unlike actual defense or proper preemption—the Americans (etc.) are not victims of the Saddam regime in common with the Iraqi people who then have a common moral claim and interest in replacing Saddam, but an invader whose perceived commonality of interest with the people of Iraq ends with the removal of Saddam, after which our perceived interests are opposed.

and the argument against preemptive war, which is as much moral as pragmatic, is pretty much the same today as it was in 2002.

There is no serious argument made against preemptive war. The "pure" deontological argument against preventive war remains much the same as in 2002, with no additional buttressing. The pragmatic argument aainst preventive war is somewhat buttressed by the results of the Iraq campaign. Sophisticated arguments like those applying Just War doctrine which involves both deontological elements and pragmatic elements balancing of benefits and costs, are likewise buttressed by the results of the Iraq War.

Now, you can argue that non-preemptive wars are more likely to get broad international support, and that this in turn is more likely to lead to success.

Well, certainly one could argue that defensive, including preemptive, wars are more likely to get broad international support or, even barring such support, be recognized as legitimate by the international community and the non-regime elements of the nation that is the target of the war, and are therefore more likely to succeed.

But this just gets back to Max's original point: does this mean that anti-war liberals think the war would have been OK if only the UN had authorized it?

Well, certainly that would have both made the war consistent with international law and perhaps slightly improved the context on the ground and marginally reduced the degree of failure; had there also been more substantial international support outside of voting, that might have even further reduced the degree of failure. But its unlikely that UN approval alone would have made the war either morally justified or winnable.

Now, if you assume Bush doing what was necessary to get widespread support for authority for military action: accepting the deal brokered by Mexico and others that had majority support on the Security Council for beefed up inspections with an armed presence and firm deadlines with an explicit authorization for force on a set timeline in the event of failure, that might have transformed the situation even more.

Of course, it also might have secured actual compliance and eliminated the need for war, revealed Saddam as a paper tiger, weakened his regime, and paved the way—though not quick and easy, but note that invasion hasn't done that either—for a domestic, internal transition.

Either way, it would have been far better than what we ended up with.

That actually comes perilously close to my own view.

So, your own view has gone the whole way from "the war is a good idea" to "the war would have been a good idea, except the UN opposed it"? Well, I wish I could say I was surprised and disappointed, but I'm really not.

But it's not an argument I've heard much of lately.

Well, its a pretty dumb argument that mostly only gets raised as a strawman used by pro-war pundits trying to justify their claims that the anti-this-war left was wrong from the beginning even as the bulk of the public is coming around to being anti-this-war.

Listen: If you are under direct and imminent threat of attack, then you have a right to defend yourself. This was not the case with Iraq. The administration has repeatedly conflated 9-11 with Iraq in order to justify the war, and it has told countless other lies to justify it.

I became skeptical very early because of Bush's urgency to attack and not let the inspections play out. It seemed pretty transparent to me that Bush was simply going through the motions with the U.N. resolutions and everything else -- he was itching to get the war started, and that seems quite obvious in retrospect. At the time, I was initially quite alarmed by Iraq but quickly shifted to an anti-war stance largely because of Bush's insincerity in the pre-war negotiations. He did not act like a man who was trying to avoid a war with Iraq, just as he is not now acting like a man trying to avoid war with Iran. He appears to be itching for it.

Granted, Saddam did not help himself by being pretty cagey about the WMD he didn't have. But given that his mortal enemy Iran would have been very interested to know how little firepower he actually had, one can see the logic behind Saddam's unwillingness to come clean about it.

Now Iraq is a broken country and what do we have to show for our half a billion dollars and 3,000 dead soldiers and 25,000 severely wounded soldiers? What do we have as a result that we would not have had if we had simply not done this thing? We've isolated ourselves, we're weaker, we're despised around the world, not for our freedom, but for our belligerence.

Members of the religious left opposed the invasion of Iraq for the simple reason that war is everywhere and in every case - wrong. It never solves anything and inevitably plants the seeds of the next war. Real liberals understand this. If only there were a few more around...

The value of international opinion isn't just because it's the only way to secure military support, it's because the international community has some brains and are not tied to U.S. political considerations.

France also thought the Iraqis had something, I imagine that they thought Rumsfeld seemed so certain because he still had the merchants copy of the receipts. But they, and many others, perferred to let the inspectors do their work and that we secure things in Afghanistan first.

Wouldn't it have been nice to capture Osama Bin Laden with all the non-diverted resources we could have left in Afghanistan instead of yank out? Maybe prevented the Madrid or London bombings? Avoided the quagmire we're now in?

Incomptence was surely an issue, how could anyone have trusted the running of a precision campaign with someone who said that WMDs were in "the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Read that again - "east, west, south, and north" is everywhere. How anyone could have listened to him without saying "Whatta maroon" is beyond me.

But incomptence is only part of the reason that these kind of projects fail. Even in a well run enterprise, the present state would have been a risk, perhaps a likely or even unavoidable outcome considering the facts of the Iraqi nation.

There's always risks when you choose the path of war, which is why the wise are careful with this decision. Like anything else, one measures the risks and rewards, which is why war isn't considered a good idea vs. intangible/potential future threats.

Pre-emptive war is when you attack someone who is about to attack you.

More precisely, pre-emptive war is when you attack someone who is in the process of attacking you, but before they have actually successfully delivered the attack.

For instance, if you intercept radio communications ordering the launch of ballistic missiles at you, and you immediately launch your own strike before the enemy can attack you, you have engaged in preemption.

What Bush engaged in against Iraq is what some have termed "preventive war", which is a subset of what is generally known as "aggressive war": to wit, war for which there is neither an actual attack nor a specific imminent threat provoking the war, nor is there a threat to international peace and security short of an actual or imminent attack judged to warrant the use of force by a body competent to do so under international law.

"Preventive war" is distinguished from other kinds of aggressive war by the aggressor's claim that a speculative, general threat that the target nation poses currently or in the future (not an imminent threat) justifies the attack.

Kevin, first of all -- and not solely to mince words or split hairs -- when are people going to stop calling the American military presence in Iraq a "war"?

One one nations military invades another nation without the consent of that nations leaders, seeks to destroy the regime there, and occupy the nation and impose a regime of its own liking, that is, indeed, a war.

That one or the other nations involved may not have declared a state of war, that certain conditions in the domestic law of some of the nations involved pertaining to certain classes of war (i.e., "declared war") may not be triggered, etc., do not change the fact that a war exists.

Kevin,

I think this August 15, 2002 article from the Nation best captures the sentiments from those who believed we were rushing to war without adequate consideration of the risks involved. The war's supporters never addressed most or all of these very basic concerns prior to the invasion of Iraq.

It's a must read if you're trying to recreate the debate from memory alone.

I'm not a blogger. But I was opening my mouth and talking about the stupidity of the war prior to the invasion in my circle of friends, family, and coworkers. And now (note this well) I am opposing the coming war in Iran.

I opposed the Iraq war from *before* the beginning for more than one reason:

(a) The U.N. inspectors hadn't finished their work and were kicked out of the country in advance of imminent attack.

(b) I didn't think Bush and his team were serious about diplomacy. I thought they were talking out of one side of their mouth and doing the other.

(c) I didn't think Iraq was a threat to us. We had no-fly zones over their country, we had embargoes, and to me the country didn't look like a present or future threat.

(d) Iraq hadn't *attacked* us on 9/11. I also don't think we should've attacked Afghanistan, for that matter. I thought the official gov't line, at the time, was that the hijackers had come mostly from Saudi Arabia. SAUDI ARABIA. Including bin Laden, originally (and still had a lot of roots there with extended family and royal connections).

(e) In general, Cheney and Bush seemed to me like lying sacks of $hit then (and even more so now). I saw Bush as being an illegaally *appointed* president (the Supreme Court of Florida, while slow, was in the process of supervising that state's vote count, as was legal under our national constitution). I saw Bush as a continuous failure throughout his life at his many endeavors. I saw him as a flat-out war dodger who not only got a plum assignment but then went AWOL from it. I saw Cheney as a repeat draft dodger by getting bogus deferments. In short, I saw them both as chicken hawks who knew nothing about war except for how to avoid it under personal threat of "service to their country", and who were now itching to retroactively "prove their manhood" by starting a war of their own.

(f) I thought Powell's appearance in front of the United Nations was pathetic and it threw up all kind of red flags for me.

(g) I thought the playing of the nuclear card -- excuse me, "the mushroom cloud card" was bogus and over-hyped.

(h) I knew of the reputation of Perle and some of the others who had previously screwed the country over in various ways in earlier Republican administrations.

(i) I knew something of the history of the great powers (Britain, Russia, others) in the Middle East and to me, starting a war in the Middle East just seemed stupid to the max.

(j) The "Azores coalition meeting" pre-invasion just seemed fantastically pathetic to me on so many levels I don't know where to start. America, Britain and Portugal. Great. There was the coalition assembled on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Why the Azores? It seemed fakey to me then, it seems fakey to me now.

I could go on. In a nutshell, I saw the administration and its surrogates as a crowd of poseurs, fakers, chickenhawks and liars. Yes, *liars*. My pre-war opinions have only thickened over time. For you, Kevin, or any other "inside-Washington-politics" to retroactively say that they were "duped" seems like such an easy way out. Were you dumber four years ago, and now you're smarter? Were you not as able to sift and focus on evidence then, and now you are? What?

This whole thing -- Kevin's original post and this whole discussion -- seems to me to be nothing more than the never-ending effort of the so-called "pro-war liberals" to prove to themselves, somehow, some way, that they were "right" to support Bush's invasion of Iraq after all.

It was an illegal war of unprovoked aggression based on lies, for the corrupt purpose of seizing control of Iraq's oil for the Bush administration's backers in the oil industry.

It was wrong. Lots of people knew it was wrong, lots of people knew exactly what it was all about, and said so, loudly, and marched in the streets about it, at the time.

It was wrong -- before the arrogant incompetence and greedy corruption of the Bush administration turned the occupation of Iraq into a bloody catastrophe, it was already wrong.

The so-called "pro-war liberals" were wrong.

They should admit it, and get over it.

There were many reasons, usually based on preexisting convictions, for opposing the war, such as beliefs that war is not the best way to resolve many problems, that it may worsen them, or skepticiam about whether this administration would run a war in a way that beneficial. That was not the primary factor in why 13 million people protested on February 15, 2003, the largest international protest in history, however. The primary factor--in other words, what they (I) were supporting in their (my) hearts, minds, and guts--was that there was an alternative to war: the United Nations inspections. Those inspections would determine whether Iraq had WMDs, and thus whether there was a threat or not. Above all, people were supporting giving the inspections a chance. That's what the UN was supporting; no need to speculate about whether you would support a UN-sanctioned war. The prior question that needs to be answered first is whether you did--or would--support UN actions to determine whether a war was necessary in the first place. It's hard for me to believe that even antiwar liberals who once supported war were opposed to letting the inspections run their course. There were other reasons to support the war--removing an odious dictatorship, spreading democracy in the Middle East, or even gaining control over a vital natural resource--and that's an argument worth having. But that's not what the war was sold on, or even should be sold on. Was Iraq a threat to U.S. national security--that is, was it a threat to the safety of the American people? That's the key question, and it's one the UN inspections would have answered. Those who supported the war failed to apply the key test--that war is a last resort. That's true for two reasons: (1) because of the destructiveness and unintended consequences that war brings, even when it is well run and those running it have a well thought out plan for peace; (2) because all peaceful means and avenues should be explored and exhausted first. The bedrock of opposition to this, or any, war lies here: the conviction that war should be a last resort, to be considered only when peaceful means have been exhausted (and that doesn't mean the Neville Chamberlain strategy, but building and using robust peaceful means and forces adequate to the task). Kevin, if you want a debate about a nonmilitary foreign policy to bein, as an earlier post urged, I'd suggest that you begin here.

Pre-emptive war is just one of the many bullshit
manipulations of language that the neocons and Bush foisted on (seemingly) intelligent Americans.
Many of us never bought it for the obvious reason that it makes as much sense as shooting your neighbor, because he might have an affair with your wife. Then of course there is the fact that it should have been bleeding obvious to the meanest intelligence that Bush/Cheney are seriously disturbed indivduals. Maybe they didn't recognize it in Texas, but the press who covered the election/selection of 2000 should have. It's always easy to be annoyed with those who have the legitimate right to say I told you so. Unfortunately, we're in the same deep shit as those who got us here.

Iraq was a preventive war.

What kind of war was (were) the war(s) in the Balkans? That (they) also lacked U.N. support.

Are you sure that anti-war critics are not getting sufficient credit? I thought the problem was that they can't agree among themselves what to do next (in addition to the fact that they didn't agree in their criticisms).

The UNSC created a sanctions regime against Iraq, and is (or may be) creating a sanctions regime against Iran. The UNSC has passed resolutions against Syrian involvement in Lebanon, and passed resolutions against the Baathist government in Iraq. There are also sanctions on trade with N. Korea. What kind of war is it when the US (with some allies, but not necessarily many allies) enforces UN resolutions without the additional UN resolutions authorizing the force?

But nonetheless most people rejected the concept of "pre-emptive war" and rejected the notion that even if WMD claims were all correct Saddam was an actual threat in any way to this country.

Is that even true of most war opponents, much less "most people"? The lack of WMDs, and resultant mistrust of all administration "intelligence", has been the single most important fact eroding support for the war.

last question, as long as we are talking about liberals: Don't liberals get embarrassed by all these toothless "resolutions" passed by the UNSC? Hizbollah is substantially re-armed; without the US invasion Saddam Hussein would have suffered "no consequences" instead of "serious consequences". Or the atrocious behavior by the U.N. "peacekeeping" armies? The U.S. crimes at Abu Ghraib hardly rank in seriousness and scope.

a few of them have admitted it ... their continued inability to "get over it" seems to prompt the majority of these types of posts.

I see this as kevin's and max's insecurity, nothing more profound.

Speaking only for myself, all I wanted was some convincing evidence that Saddam has reconstituted his weapons programs and posed a significant threat -- which, given the nature of the Baathist regime, wasn't exactly an impossibly high hurdle to overcome. Or so I thought.

Instead, we got lots of overblown rhetoric about UAVs hovering of the eastern seaboard, small vials of "If this was really anthrax ...", and cartoonish and exaggerated drawings of supposed mobile weapons labs (that ended up being weather balloon platforms.

Oh, yeah, and we got lots of insults, along with heaping helpings of insinuations about our supposed lack of patriotism because we dared to question Fearless Leader's decision to turn away from Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

If we learn anything from this latest misadventure, it's that the true lessons of Vietnam in fact held considerable merit, that a healthy dose of skepticism on the part of the general public isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to debating issues of war and peace.

Without reading any of the responses so far, I will chime in with my own reasons for opposing the war from the start:

1) I suspsected that the war would necessarily lead to a lengthy occupation (especially since PNAC doctrine said that permanent bases were a strategic goal), and I could very well imagine that Iraq would become our own West Bank.

2) There were dissenting views about WMDs -- I don't know about blogs, but definitely in the international news -- even in those early days.

3) And despite whatever one took as the truth about WMDs, one had to ask oneself whether the cost of the war would be worth it since conventional WMDs are not particularly effective weapons. If I were a terrorist, I wouldn't bother trying to procure exotic biological or chemical weapons -- it's been well-proven that a mundane fuel-fertilizer bomb is perfectly good to kill hundreds of people (McVeigh) or an airplane (the 9/11 terrorists).

--David

The only good things to come out of the war (and in now way worth the cost) are:

1. that this kind of bloody nose will perhaps make the US is less cavalier about invading other countries for hyped up reasons (for the next thirty or so years anyway by which time you will have to more strongly factor in China's response)

2. a less somnabulent American citizenry.

3. a curtailing of the ablilty of America's elite to exercise power

I opposed this war (FTR I was in favour of the First Gulf War, Bosnis, Kosovo (with more ground support) and Afghanistan; against Panama, against Grenada) because it seemed obvious to me that the reasons were being trumped up, that any WMD stockpiles Saddam had were negligible. The claims of drones capable of reaching the US and of mushroom clouds were the worst kind of hype - and I was gobsmacked that so many Americans were falling for it. As for the Al Qaeda/Saddam crap, well, you know, sometimes up is up and down is down... the links proponents tried to draw were so convoluted... I saw Bush and the people around him as chomping at the bit to attack and seizing on anything they could as rationalization...

My judgement proved absolutely correct. Of course those with no judgement - the Peter Beinarts of the world - want to discredit it.

and I will echo DH - Unecessary wars are always wrong. War is always the last, last, last option.

In 2002, Iraq went from not being on anybody's radar as a threat to the U.S. to being *the* principal threat to the U.S. - all this with no change in their wmd capability (whatever it was perceived to be at the time). For me, this is what set off the alarm bells. If Iraq wasn't a threat in 2001, how did they suddenly become a threat worth an invasion in 2002?

And, let's say they had all the stockpiles they were claimed to have, and they had some desire to cooperate with Al Qaeda. What were they waiting for? We'd been attacked several times by Al Qaeda (WTC the first time, USS Cole, Saudi Arabia, etc.) with no Iraqi-supplied wmd involved. Seems like if they were going to do that they had their chances.

All of this added up to: "we want to invade Iraq, for reasons we're not telling you, and we're now making stuff up to justify it". It was never necessary to invade.

I wish my memory were more detailed about what anti-war liberals were saying back in 2002, but it's not.

—Kevin Drum

That's why I rarely read this blog any more. You're a fucking idiot.

Dude - What The Hell?

you are back at nations as amoral sharks, claiming advantage. Not the way to enforce a ruleset among nations.

What was being "prevented?" Saddam was caged and cornered. Preventive war usually means stopping an aggression - thus GW1 is fine - GW2, no.

robb Perason: "Kevin, first of all -- and not solely to mince words or split hairs -- when are people going to stop calling the American military presence in Iraq a 'war'?"

Please pardon us for that slight.

We really meant to say "an established military presence on foreign soil that is currently costing us an average of 100 dead, 500 wounded, and $8 billion per month."

This is inane nonsense. Read the speeches in the Congressional Record about why the war was wrong AND a mistake, that is about what the anti-war people said, on the left and also the few brave souls on the right who opposed it.

And what is this junk about arguing that it is somehow inconsistent be opposed to the war both because it was a bad idea, a wrong thing to do and the fools couldn't do it right even if it were otherwise OK.

OK, so you got too very good solid arguments not to start the stupid war. How do those two cancel out, or make the anti-war position self-contradictory? Now you let some stupid-ass CYA artists spout meaningless incoherent goggledygook and you fall for it.

Try this out on your spouse: Hey, the restaurant we want to go to has really crummy food -the very idea of this food is horrible and you will gag even thinking about it -it's a combo of Hungarian-Vietnamese-Creole with good old American liver and onions poured over the top of everything, even the ice goulash ice cream for desert. And PLUS, even if the reicpes were good, the cooks are incompetent and can't boil water.

So, we should go. See, the two badnesses cancel each other out, so they don't count. And theoretically, my reasons could be twisted into potential inconsistencies on theories about what kind of food is good and what isn't.

This is crap. Are you turning into a mainstream pundit or something?

I speak for no one other than myself, but I think that Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Byrd, and their arguments, have enhanced credibility right now. As well as the other Democratic senators (and Congressmen) who voted against the war resolution.

when are people going to stop calling the American military presence in Iraq a 'war'?

Fine. Clusterfuck it is.