principled action vs. political football

Dear ------- :

The principle weakness of your argument [for the original letter to which this is a response, click here] is that it's based on the "straw man" fallacy (i.e. setting up a false, hyperbolic or oversimplified opponent's position as a "straw man" which can then be easily knocked down). No serious critic of the Administration's policy in Iraq, and certainly none of the individuals you quote, hold that the President simply "lied" in order to gin up a war to benefit his "oil buddies." The criticisms tend to be that 1) the Administration's UN-circumventing war policy was ethically flawed and pragmatically unwise, and/or 2), the stronger claim that it exagerrated the intelligence evidence that it had and/or, stronger still, leaned on CIA analysts to produce misleading reports on the status of Iraqi WMD programs.

Your own quotes reflect this. With the exception of the Berger quote, all the quotes you show between 1998 and 2001 decry or warn about Iraqi WMD programs, research or potential -- not existing munitions. As stated above, the question was never whether Hussein was a noxious despot nor hostile to the US; the question was his commitment and his capacity to hurt US interests -- i.e. whether he had ongoing WMD programs, what the status of them was, and most relevantly, whether they'd produced any actual munitions or could in a timely fasion. The stronger timbre of the quotes from 2002-2003 reflects the Administration's case that President Bush began to lay out in his State of the Union address in January 2002. This case was based on intelligence reports that the President himself has now set up a panel to investigate.
The increasing appearance that no such munitions exitsted does not prove that Hussein wasn't a threat, nor that he shouldn't have been deposed by force. It does, however, lend credit to what many argued in 2002, which was that the nature of the threat was such that a broad-based and *legal* UN coalition united against Iraqi intransigence regarding UN disarmament resolutions was the most appropriate course of action. It was this course of action that we did not follow.
The war authorization act, you'll recall, was passed by about 2/3 of the House and 3/4 of the Senate. Many Democrats who voted for the authorization, like Kerry, accepted the Adminstration's word on two points: 1) that intelligence reports indicated not just "intentions" or "programs" but immediately threatening WMD munitions; 2) that the President needed Congressional backing in order to win UN approval. The Administration made a presentation to the UN that was, to many, clearly ad-hoc. The Administration failed to win UN support for an attack; it attacked anyway, over the protests of the Secretary General and many Security Council members. That the Adminstration won the case it made to Congress is indisputable; it's reflected in the votes, as well as in the comments you cite. That it won its case on the basis of exagerrated evidence seems, at this point, almost beyond dispute; this reflects merely unethical, not illegal, political conduct. That it won its case on the basis of false evidence (WH pressure on CIA) is a more serious claim that remains to be vetted.

One last point, which is tangential but interesting. Bear in mind that Hussein had many entirely domestic and regional reasons for playing a shell-bead game with UN inspectors, even if he had no bead under any shell. He'd made himself the enemy of his neighbors and much of his own population; he had every reason not to advertise his weakness to the world: i.e. that not only was his army decimated, but that he had no secret doomsday weapons to hold his enemies off. Naturally, he should have showed his empty pockets and thrown himself on the mercy of the US and UN; but he was, after all, an idiot and a tyrant.

I think Hussein should have been deposed. But I think he should have been deposed in such a way that would have strengthened, rather than undermined, the principles upon which the US, the UN and civilized nations everywhere are based: free self-determination and due process under a rule of law. By trying to get an easy "win" for those principles (or for whatever motive) by cutting corners and bulldozing, the President undermined them, creating a perception overseas of the United States as a nation of hypocritical cheaters who pay lip service to democracy and due process and follow the law when it suits them. If we read the news and think about how the average American behaves in his or her daily life, at home and at the office, I'm not sure that such a perception of us isn't rather accurate. I think we'd all do well to engage in less Punch-and-Judy partisan football and invest our energy instead in demanding behavior, from our leaders and ourselves, that's more in line with the principles that we espouse and whose benefits we enjoy.

butt and belief

-----Original Message-----
From: -------
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2004 8:54 PM

The picture Democrats have been hoping nobody had: John Kerry sitting
behind Jane Fonda during an anti-war rally at Valley Forge , PA in September
1970.

Dear ------:

That's right. And only the most fashionably jaded political cynic would see that picture as a smear. Let's list the rest: in addition to the Fonda co-appearance, Kerry *also* testified in Congress against the war, and participated in protests. Good man: bad war -- certainly by the time he was protesting: long overextended, grotesque death toll, dishonest public policy, unstated or nonexistent war objectives. Cf. Colin Powell for an evaluation. Having said that -- and even if you don't agree with *his* view of the war -- isn't it impressive that, unlike Bush (who, as he himself told the Houston Chronicle, "didn't want to blast my ear out with a shotgun or go to Canada, so I decided to better myself by learning to fly airplanes"), Kerry lived the necessary paradox to which Bush can't even pay honest lip service: he volunteered for active duty, fought in a war his country had committed itself to, and also subsequently fought, in appropriate civil channels, to change that policy commitment. That's how it's supposed to work, isn't it? That's what the civics textbook says: don't break the law; obey it and agitate to change it if you don't like it. But maybe the American Way -- representative government, civic duty, the rule of law -- all that civics-class, Founding-Fathers stuff -- what a lot of nonsense! We don’t have time for that; we've got important jokes to tell our friends! Well, I’m still impressed by a guy who believes in duty on the battlefield and the assembly field, rather than the ball-field. I think Kerry's record of war, protest and civil service is a much better example of Right Living than anything that an irresponsible adolescent drunk like me or GW Bush ever did. I don't think that a protest record -- or pictures that some cynic thinks that *anybody* "have been hoping nobody had" -- is going to do any damage to a guy who can respond by saying, "that's right; I also fought. And you, Mr. President?" Call me crazy, but I don't think that the Republicans are going to want to thematize the Vietnam issue. Kerry's a guy who put his butt where his beliefs were, rather than cutting corners and thus, 30 years later, having to send out an emissary out to parse whether "to be paid" means "to show up for work." You probably don't like Kerry's economic policy, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that he wins the honor issue. In fact, when you put the two of them next to each other, it's a little nauseating.

And since GW's minion has made parsing the order of the day, I'll give you my definition of "jaded": it's someone who, whether he says it or not, in his heart of hearts really does intuitively believe that "character" is more a matter of the length of a man's hair than of the principle of his actions.