Over the course of the last several years, I've excerpted and referred to plenty of (I think) very reasonable arguments in favor of the Iraq War (which, of course, refers to both the short war to remove Hussein, and the efforts to stabilize resultant chaos and bide time until the Iraqis developed a working government and military of their own). I've also tried to shoot down the various degrees (subtle to blatant) of annoying hysteria that permeates most all anti-war arguments. My rationale there has been that if one is going to critique the war, one ought do so reasonably.
Here's a reasonable argument against the war, offered by the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and excerpted here from her final book:
Iraq lacked practically all the requirements for a democratic government: rule of law, an elite with a shared commitment to democratic procedures, a sense of citizenship, and habits of trust and cooperation.... The administration's failure involved several issues, but the core concern is that they did not seem to have methodically completed the due diligence required for reasoned policy-making because they failed to address the aftermath of the invasion. This, of course, is reflected by the violence, sectarian unrest, ethnic vengeance and bloodshed we see today in Iraq.
I'm not stipulating to anything except that this is a reasonable, genuine, sincere, and humble critique. Note that no anti-Bush, anti-America, anti-imperialism, anti-Conservative, conjectured color-scheme psychological/psychoanalytical who-hah, or post-nationalist perspective needed.
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