Mike Kinsley is a brilliant and genuinely nice man. But he’s also deeply partisan. I can’t see any other reason for the obtuseness of his latest column. Herewith a brief fisking of its opener (Kinsley’s prose is in italics. Mine isn’t.):
How has an attack on the United States by a terrorist group based in Afghanistan led us to war against Iraq?
9/11 revealed how vulnerable the United States is to international Islamist terrorism. It revealed the absolute ruthlessness of the enemy. It also revealed the possibility of a nightmare chemical, biological or nuclear 9/11. For twelve years, the United States and others have been trying to get Saddam Hussein to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction. 9/11 made resolving that issue far more urgent, since there was a clear possibility that Saddam could deliver such weapons to some of his terrorist clients. So we decided to get serious about Saddam. How hard is that argument to grasp? The linkage was there from the very beginning. Yours truly even mentioned Iraq as a state sponsor of such terror the very week of September 11.
Why are nuclear weapons in Iraq worth a war but not nuclear weapons in North Korea?
Because Saddam doesn’t have them yet but Kim Jong Il does. When the enemy has the capacity to create nuclear Armageddon, it obviously raises the risks of military intervention. Again: I’d have thought for a person of Kinsley’s intellect, that rather elementary point would be a no-brainer.
For most skeptics about Gulf War II (including me), the Bush administration’s failure to answer these two questions sincerely or even plausibly, let alone convincingly, is central to our doubts.
Why, pray, is worrying about the risk of WMDs in the hands of terrorists obviously insincere or implausible? Why is believing that Saddam be disarmed not just unconvincing but implausible? This was Clinton’s policy. The Security Council affirmed it 15 – 0 not so long ago. Was the entire U.N. insincere? You could, of course, find these arguments unconvincing. You could believe Saddam has no WMDs. You could believe that he has them but won’t ever use them again, although he has in the past. You could argue that he has no links to international terrorism (against the mass of evidence available). But Kinsley’s not interested in those arguments. He’s interested in simply asserting that the president is a bad liar (that’s the more direct way of saying he hasn’t answered obvious questions about Iraq “sincerely or even plausibly”). That’s not an argument. It’s a cheap partisan shot.
This isn’t entirely reasonable. The battle could be worth joining even though George W. is unable to explain why.
Oh, please. The president has been plenty able to explain why; and plenty of people, including the prime minister of Great Britain, and a majority of Americans, agree with him. Why doesn’t Kinsley call Blair’s case insincere and implausible? It’s indistinguishable from Bush’s.
The 9/11 pretext may be phony without necessarily invalidating the whole exercise. As for Iraq versus North Korea, following the right policy in one place is better than following the wrong policy in both. There are worse things in this world than logical inconsistency. Furthermore, it is hard to dismiss the official reasons for this war as disingenuous without some theory about what the ulterior motive or unspoken war aim might be. George W. Bush is not taking the nation into war to avenge his father or as a “wag the dog” strategy to win re-election, as Bush’s more cynical opponents have charged. He deserves more credit than that. Nor is he planning to conquer and occupy Iraq in order to bring human rights to the Iraqi people or start a chain reaction of democracy throughout the Middle East, as he and his supporters have lately augmented the official war aims. He doesn’t deserve that much credit.
Funny, but from the beginning, the president has clearly and unmistakably portrayed this conflict as a battle between democracy and a new Islamist totalitarianism. And from the beginning – not “lately” – the president’s supporters have made pro-democracy arguments. Here, to take one example, is a quote that Kinsley didn’t hear – because presumably he wasn’t listening – from the president’s speech last June about the situation in Israel: “I have a hope for the people of Muslim countries … You have a rich culture, and you share the aspirations of men and women in every culture. Prosperity and freedom and dignity are not just American hopes, or Western hopes. They are universal, human hopes. And even in the violence and turmoil of the Middle East, America believes those hopes have the power to transform lives and nations.” So you see the president does indeed deserve some credit. And if he were a Democrat, Kinsley would not hesitate to give him some. As for the rest of Mike’s column – veering into Chomskyan territory about blood for oil – I leave its inconsistencies to the readers of Slate.
The Dish 