Category Archives: WMD

Doe a Deer In A Massive Mailbox

Americans are like Australian Marsupials; they’ve developed in isolation, an existential condition that may account for some bizarre traits, such as believing every tall-tale—WMD in Iraq, for instance. So it comes as no surprise that the press has run with a story alleging Virginian Senator George Allen, already a controversial character, caught a deer during his college days, and “after the deer was killed…cut off the doe’s head, asked for directions to the home of the nearest black person and shoved the head into that person’s mailbox.”

Maybe I’m over inquisitive, but my only question is, How on earth did Allen get the deer’s head into a US mailbox?

Auster Angry

Iraq, The Zeitgeist, War, WMD

Lawrence Auster has requested that I print the following:

Ilana,

I think you were out of line the other day when you referred to me as an “apologist” for the Iraq war. To call someone an “apologist” implies he is completely on board with something and is committed to defending it no matter what. To call me an “apologist” implies that I was acting out of partisanship or emotional identification and that I didn’t have a reasoned and critical basis for what I have argued over and over, which was (1) that we had reasons to believe that Iraq, a rogue regime, had WMDs, and (2) that given the existence of terror groups who would like to cause infinite damage to us if they could, we could not permit the Iraqi regime to continue in possession of, and continue developing further capacities in, WMDs which might be transferred to those terrorist groups. I also said prior to the war that I saw terrible things coming out of the war, but that I couldn’t see a way to avoid the logic summarized above that made the war necessary. That’s not being an apologist. That’s having a reasoned, and very reluctant, argument.

You could have described me as a person who supported the invasion for the reasons I have given. Given the huge number of criticisms and doubts I expressed about the war effort from many months before the war to the present moment, particularly my opposition to waging a war for the purpose of spreading democracy, for you to come out and call me simply an “apologist” for the war, period, as though I were an all-out champion of the administration in the manner of a Hugh Hewitt or a Rush Limbaugh, was not true or fair.

Lawrence Auster

Auster is definitely no Hannity, Hewitt or Limbaugh. If I gave that impression, it was unintended. However, because Mr. Auster’s “reasoned” position was palpably and patently flawed, violating objective reality, natural and international law, and the Constitution—he ought not to have held it. Iraq, in those good old days, was an economically desperate, secular dictatorship, profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. At the time of the invasion, it had acquiesced to inspectors (was in fact being criss-crossed by teams of them), hadn’t any ties to al-Qaeda or a hand in Sept. 11. It was a Third-World nation, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war. Iraq had no navy or air force. It was no threat to American national security. —ILANA

Blood On Their Hands

Iraq, Media, War, WMD

On June 25, 2003, I wrote:

“When the administration plants or uncovers a couple of dozen drums of inactive, old goop, minus the necessary dispersing systems, ‘Boobus Americanus’ will easily accept these as the real ruse for war.

That day arrived. Last week, the administration issued a low-key announcement: it had unearthed in Iraq pre-Gulf War munitions containing degraded sarin.

“Hallelujah, proclaimed some of the Boobi. Salvation at last: the reason for an unjust war had been found. The administration didn’t quite go along with them.

War mongers and apologists must either expiate, or be doomed to wonder about, forever searching for a symbolic salve for rotting souls, and alternately muttering, “Out, damned spot! out, I say!”

Iraqi War Blues By Tibor Machan

America, BAB's A List, Democrats, Economy, Iraq, War, WMD

I’ve said before that I’ve nothing new to say about the crime the Bush administration perpetrated in Iraq. Other than the necessary repetition, few have. I take that back. My guest today on Barely a Blog is Tibor Machan, who has come up with this philosophically acute principle: “Believing something that’s unjustified to believe doesn’t count as a reason for acting on the belief.”

Machan is RC Hoiles Professor of business ethics & free enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

IRAQI WAR BLUES
By Tibor Machan

It is blues because it’s such a torment—to most Americans, to those who have died—and to a lot of families who have lost members—in this war, and to the supporters because they can’t advance a convincing reason to stay the course.

President George W. Bush may have wanted to hit Iraq even before 9/11 and his reason may well have been that he thought Saddam Hussein did hide some weapons of mass destruction. I have no idea whether Bush was honest but even if he was, it’s no excuse because believing that WMD were hidden in Iraq doesn’t appear to have been justified. Believing something that’s unjustified to believe doesn’t count as a reason for acting on the belief. Say you irrationally believe your spouse is cheating on you and so you decided to meet out punishment. It’s no excuse to say, “But I believed you were cheating on me— even if you did but in fact had no reason to.

Did Bush have good reasons, compelling ones, to think Iraq had WMD? There seems to be no support for this view anywhere now. So then attacking Iraq, while not anything most reasonable people could be too upset about so far as Saddam Hussein is concerned, doesn’t appear to have been justified.

How does this bear on the current debate as to whether the war in Iraq is “a war of choice”? Yes, this seems to be a big deal now—was the war necessary or did Bush decide to wage it as a matter of preference, something he didn’t need to do? Some—for example Republican pundit Morton Kondracke of weekend TV news program “The Beltway Boys”—think that since Bush believed there were WMD in Iraq, the war was not one of choice but of necessity. But this is the kind of justification I sketched above for punishing one’s spouse because one honestly but irrationally thinks one has been betrayed. Even if Bush honestly thought Iraq had WMD, if that belief was ill founded, as it evidently was, the war could be considered a war of choice. There was no objective necessity for it.

Mind you, most of Bush’s critics from among the liberal Democrats have no good case against him either. They haven’t ever objected to preemptive public policies that intrude on innocent people, let alone those under serious if mistaken suspicion. Just consider as a perfect current example how eagerly former VP Al Gore is urging his various precautionary measures—ones that would intrude on millions of us without any regard for civil liberties and due process—because he feels we face big risks from environmental hazards (global warming, climate change, what have you). Gore and his supporters, who complain about Bush’s preemptive war policies because they were preemptive, are hypocrites.

Only those who consistently uphold what we might dub the George Washington doctrine about getting America militarily entangled have a case against Bush & Co. These folks believe that free countries may only go to war when there is a justified and dependable belief that the country is under attack or about to be attacked. The emphasis here is on justified and dependable. Forcibly intervening in other people’s lives is only justifiable when these other people are mounting or about to mount an attack. A war is just, in other words, only when it is defensive.

George W. Bush’s war against Iraq was never defensive, not because he may not have believed the country needs defending from WMD, but because his and his administration’s beliefs about Iraq’s WMD were unjustified, ill founded. Nothing in the meantime, since the war commenced, has changed this fact. Not that there was nothing at all murky about Saddam Hussein and WMD. Yes there was, what with all that hide-and-seek involving the United Nations’ team of inspectors. But war is too big a deal, military, and indeed any other kind of aggression is too big a deal, to start in a murky situation.

Bush, of course, is no consistent follower of the George Washington doctrine. Nor are most of his liberal Democratic critics. So their quarrel about the war in Iraq is mostly incoherent. The only part that has some bona fide relevance concerns the issue of how long to keep American troops in Iraq now that the American military is there.