The liberal interventionist, Paul Berman, expresses my view entirely about the rationale for the war against Saddam, even accounting for the WMD embarrassment:
What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.
But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy – it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise – mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else’s sake, Muslims’ especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.
For me, September 11 told us we faced a huge problem – one that would annihilate our civilization if we did not confront it. Confronting it meant engaging the Arab Musim world and finding a way to bring it into modernity. Only dangerous, time-consuming, casualty-incurring involvement would achieve this. Iraq is the very beginning, not the end game. My fundamental concern with the Dean candidacy is that he doesn’t recognize this. He doesn’t see the bigger picture: that the terror we face is not a function of mere criminality but of ideology. But unless we have leaders who understand the depth of the problem and the threat, we are doomed not just to defeat but to catastrophe.
The Dish 