E Pluribus Unum

The Mission was Accomplished.  Right about the time it looked conclusive that Saddam didn't have any WMDs, and Valerie Plame was being outed, Dean Esmay, with the full benefit of myopic hindsight declared it just didn't matter why we went in.  Indeed, the he argued the whole WMD argument was merely a lawyerly ruse to paint our aggression with a UN and Congressional blessing.  After all, the real reasons we invaded Iraq and let Bin Laden escape justice were more important -- but obviously not quite as persuasive to those quaint notions of international law.

#1) In order to go forward with the War On Terror, we had to put the Fear of God and the United States into the brutal, murdering, "look-the-other-way-at-terrorists" thugs who rule most of the Middle East. Especially in places like Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Uh...yeah.  How's that plan working out?  Syria still harbors the head of Hamas' militant wing, Khalid Meshal, who pulls the strings in Gaza from Damascus.  Lebanon's a smoking ruin, but Hezbollah is as strong as ever if not stronger after the Elliot Abrams strategy was tried last month.  Iran? Yeah, they've tucked their tail and ran from us, didn't they?  The Saudis, at $75.00 a barrel.  Whoo Nelly, we sure taught them a lesson.

If he had mentioned Libya, he might have been on to something -- but alas...

#2) We needed a strategically strong and practical place to base military operations to assist in the War on Terror. Afghanistan wasn't good enough.

Ahh yeah.  Pax Americana Imperius.  The only problem with this is that empires require emperors, and I kinda dig this representative democracy thingy we got going.  Dean's milage may vary.  But I don't think having 130,000 of our combat ready forces stuck in the sand of Iraq, unable to leave even if we wanted to, is the kind of operational assistance he was hoping to use elsewhere in the region.

By the way, we have such staging grounds in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE.  we got most of our people out of Saudi Arabia, just like Osama demanded.  Who exactly was taught the lesson there?

#3) We needed to demonstrate to the Arabist-Islamist world that we were not weak and easily cowed.

That's right, dammit.  We're gonna get tough by golly, and come up with a new name to call them Arabist-Islamist -- "Islamo-Fascists!"  That'll show 'em.  That way we can piss off the Persians in Iran as well as the Asians in Malaysia too.  Why should the Arabs have all the fun.

#4) We needed to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we would not, ever, subvert our security intersts to the so-called "will of the international community."

Check.  Wouldn't want anyone to think we weren't a rogue nation or anything.  That the best way to solve problems is through negotiation and cooperation instead of staking out intractable positions is besides the point.  We must show the world our capacity to be as childishly selfish and arrogant as a any petulant bully.

#5) We had to demonstrate that when we gave terms to a vile monster, we would hold him to those terms--and punish him severely for failing to live up to them.

Me too Dean!  We both wait eagerly for the deluge of subpoenas John Conyers' Judiciary Committee will issue next January.

#6) Saddam was giving money to terrorists--no one disputes that, even to this day. If you support terrorists, you're no better than a terrorist, and you need to pay a price for that.

I'm not going to quibble about the difference between directly arming a terrorist group, like Iran and Syria do with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, versus giving cash to the families of suicide bombers so they can afford to bury thier misguided loved one.  But I sure am glad we pursued the greater threat to the terrorists' infrastructure.

#7) Since the non-democratic thug-regimes of the Middle East helped to create the conditions that made a group like Al Qaeda possible, we needed to find a way to start reforming the Arabist/Islamist world. Iraq was as good a place to start as any.

Actually, Afghanistan was a pretty good start.  At Tora Bora in December of '01, just three months after the Twin Towers fell, we were listening to Osama apologize to everyone but the 9/11 victims for the mess he got himself into, trapped, facing certain death by our hands.  We let him go, Dean.  18 months before you vomited the foregoing irrelevancy.

Al Qaeda remains possible, remains a threat.  It had nothing to do with where we started, but the fact that we never finished -- and you and your ilk were so personally obsessed with the chance to get Hussein you lost sight of what the hell the War on Terrorists was all about.  Add to that an inexplicable indifference to the will of the people you would rather manipulate than inform, all the while sing patriotic hymnals, and the clusterfuck created in the Middle East was pre-ordained.  "We told you so," doesn't begin to cover it.

Don't even attempt the specious argument that Iraq is just another front on the WoT.  From Tora Bora to Iraq's free fall into civil war, the War on Terror has been a litany of colossal failures of leadership, cavalier disregard for the ramifications of poor planning, and an inability to focus and complete the important tasks at hand instead of promoting a partisan agenda and consolidation of an illegal executive power-grab.

How telling that all the major victories in your so-called war on extremists are the result of the "law enforcement" approach.  Moreover, using the necessity of enhancing security as an excuse to ignore the very laws that guarantee and indeed represent our freedoms is no less callous and void of logic as the lame reasoning with which we were led into Iraq.

If Karl "The Evil Genius" Rove spent as much effort making the world safe from terrorists while handing the Iraqis a stable nation as he does spining the latest death and mayhem to get Republicans (and Lieberman) elected, he'd have the Israelis teaching the Iranians Kumbaya by Christmas.

More Esmay:

Special bonus reason: Saddam and his boys were such hideous monsters that all "humanitarian" arguments against the war were null and void from day one.

Not quite sure what he meant by that, but incoherence is often the result of a non sequitur.  I hear that Thialand had in their midst a "hideous monster" who actually admits to brutally slaying some little Colorado beauty queen about twn years ago.  They must have gotten the message of our War on Thuggery, else why would the Thia authorities have given him up so quickly?

Somewhere around reason number 8 or 9 would fall "weapons of mass destruction." Which Saddam would need only small quantities of to be a threat to the US.

Dude, how's zero grab ya?

Now this next is the clincher.  The reason for the ruse.  Why they bothered put on the WMD puppet show at all when they had so many other reasons.

But the administration would have to--have to--use WMDs as its primary reason before the United Nations. That effort, whatever its limitations, indisputably helped gain us credibility and valuable allies in the war effort internationally. Before you scoff at that, consider that we had dozens of allies when we went in, and many of them didn't sign on until after we started making an effort at the UN.

Furthermore, at the UN, WMDs had to be our primary argument, because the UN would never have accepted any other reason.

STOP THE PRESSES!  The whole world would not have accepted Esmay's other spectacularly specious arguments -- only the one he says doesn't matter.  Did it ever occur that maybe it was us, we were all wrong, and everybody else in the whole frickin' world was right?

Still further, it was only necessary to demonstrate for that audience that Saddam might have them and, just as important, was still refusing to cooperate with the surrender terms that ended the Gulf War.

While your at it, don't forget those other folks who make up "that audience" -- the United States Congress and the American Public.  How little Dean thinks of our democratic institutions and the integrity of the citizenry at large to believe that we would go to war for reasons that just don't matter, and ignore all those reasons he believes are so much more important.

Don't even try to think it through Dean, it is you.  And so in the interest of fairness, lest I be accused of using out-of-context selective quotations, I'll let him conclude with a conspiracy theory that rivals the most absurd "moonbat mania" he despises.

Given all that, I couldn't possibly care less if the entirety of the "WMDs" discovered in Iraq amount to a squirt gun and a bottle of Chlorox.  [How precient -- Mark]  It's like breaking into John Wayne Gacy's house and finding out that there's only one kid's shinbone in his crawlspace, and not dozens of children's corpses. Who the hell cares?

It wouldn't surprise me if Saddam only had small weapons programs and very limited quantities of chem/bio weapons. It also wouldn't surprise me if he shipped some of his weapons off to Syria--since we now know that, despite disagreements with the Syrians, he had clandestine relationships with them to sell his oil for him, in violation of international sanctions.

Quick, call Mulder and Scully so we can get to the bottom of this at once!

I thus remain rather irritated with people who act as if our arguments before the UN about WMDs--which were the only arguments that would hold weight with the UN and were thus specifically tailored for that body--are the be-all, end-all arguments that were "sold to the American people." I never, ever, not even for a minute, thought those were our main reasons for going, and I said that over and over again here. So often that I actually get irritated when I have to repeat it again. I know, I probably shouldn't get irritated, because everyone on the planet doesn't read Dean's World religiously--but I am also far from the only person who pointed all these other reasons out.

Is irritability part of Bush Derangement syndrome?  Welcome to the club, Dean.  If only the President read Dean's World too.  Maybe then he wouldn't be so misinformed for our reason for going to Iraq.

The fact is, Saddam didn't need to have WMDs to justify what we did. He needed to be showing that he might, and was refusing to cooperate with investigations. Which no sane person disputes was exactly the case. If it turns out that he didn't have many, will that upset me? No, not in the least.

Not one. Tiny. Little. Bit.

I honestly think that if you ever believed that the arguments the US used at the Security Council were truly our primary reasons for going to war, then you were not very thoughtful--and failed to listen to the perspectives of countless other people who said all the same things I did.

Say it ain't so, Dean.  Our Commander in Chief is thoughtless?  George Bush doesn't listen to people that don't regurgitate his pre-conceived notions?  Perish the thought.

So let's be clear:

On humanitarian grounds, there was no justification for opposing this war effort.

On strategic grounds, I suppose you may well have disagreed with our reasons. I think you were wrong, but am content to let history be the judge. We'll see what the next year or two brings.

But WMDs? Yeah whatever gang. I guess obsessively anti-Bush people need something to carp about.

Why does George W. Bush hate himself?

[Hat Tip to Nitpicker for this and many more examples of Wingtard takes on WMDs.]