The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us.

GG, can you expand on this? It's a pretty absolutist statement, and taken literally I can't agree with it. Are all UN Peacekeeping missions out, for instance? Would it really have been wrong to send a unilateral peacekeeping force to Rwanda?

Maybe if it were qualified - "the US should not -- and has no right to -- unilaterally invade, bomb...". But even then it's more complicated, in my opinion, than you're suggesting.

Thanks for your great work.

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerers of death's construction

In the fields the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning

The biggest flaw was actually believing an idiot like George W. Bush would be a competent war president.

I rather think the biggest flaw is thinking the world is America's fucking sandbox and that soldiers, civilians and whole societies are action figures for us to play with in order to assuage our own hurt feelings about 9/11.

But WTF do I know...

Ahh... the core assumption.

Mine appears to be a minority position but I have never been able to figure out why the moral calculus that regards murder as a capital offense suddenly changes if the victim isn't a US citizen.

Even conceding that the world doesn't make sense on that basis, there's still a very carefully thought out doctrine (ratified by the USA after WWII) which states that war is only justified in self defense and that agressively attacking a country that isn't directly threatening you is criminal. (In the case of Nuremburg, it too was regarded as a Capital crime.)

So what has changed? Why does every moral calculation one could bring to bear on the subject suddeny become irrelevant when the actor in question is the US military?

What distresses me even more is the degree to which even asking such questions is treated as a taboo. The energy that has gone into the denunciation of anyone willing to ask those questions as "America haters" is directly proportional to the degree to which there are no good answers. While the cone of acceptability is shifting ever so slightly, I couldn't help but notice that Obama felt it necessary to make sure that he understands that ourt enemy is "Islamic extremism" as if that phrase actually means anything.

If Freedom is to mean anything at all, it has to mean the Freedom to question whether we are in fact wearing the white hats.

The frustrated question, "Why is everyone who was wrong on the war still a respected talking head, and everyone who was right remains anathema?" is answered, by implication, in this post.

Those of us who were against the war knew it was stupid. But almost all of us also knew it was immoral (if only, in some cases, because we knew that a reasonable prospect of victory is one of the elements of the "just war" doctrine.) To allow any of those who were right on the war a platform would be to allow us to voice our real objection to the Iraq horror: our opposition to the very notion of "preventive" war. Consequently, the blackout is uniformly enforced.

Obama gets a near pass, winds up allowed tentatively into the public debate, because he was careful to phrase his initial opposition in strategic terms rather than moral ones -- that famous line of "I'm not against all wars, I am just against dumb wars." He is the exception that probes the rule. The liberal war hawks, whether consciously or just by the tingling of their spidey-senses, are well aware that their continued access to mass media depends on their staying on the same side of that line. So it's hardly surprising when their meae culpae end up limited to critiques of the war's conduct, not its fundamental rationale.

And no, this is not a critique of Obama, whom I happen to support. He is astonishingly candid, for a politician. But he is not suicidal. If he has reservations about the imperial consensus (and I have no idea whether he does or not, though his former toleration of J Wright gives me some -- you should pardon the expression -- hope), he is too canny to Ronpaulify himself by saying so out loud before his feet are fully ensconced behind the bully pulpit.

I think Jason is also correct because, as progressives, when we repeat data that's not bullet-proof, it can hurt us a lot more than it would the opposition...

When former cheerleaders of war, former warmongers and former war-supporting journalists suddenly become anti-war, it makes me suspicious. It often seems that, for such people, being anti-war is little more than a cynical posture, a way of scoring points by joining the critique of an unpopular war. They appear to be serving themselves, rather than serving the potential victims of war.

-- Brendan O’Neill

Bush is back to his secondary reason for war- getting rid of Sadam. Since all the other ones haven’t worked, seems logical to repeat one and see if it works the second time (or maybe fourth or fifth, I may have lost count). This BBC article also cites Bush’s thought that all the money spent on the war is not that important, certainly not when our economic situation is so good right now and all his congressional Repug rubber stampers have done such a fine job of passing social legislation to help suffering Americans. I expect Bush is glad that the serious M$M media didn't notice this. Or have all of us including the M$M just come to expect this kind of rhetoric?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7305023.stm

Sorry, of course I meant Salon, not Slate. I'd never go to Slate-- that's a fate far worse than cookies.

Another lesson no one seems to have learned is the importance of evidence-based decision-making. Instead, it’s somehow looked upon by many as understandable and forgivable that many of our leaders suspended rational inquiry and gave into fear, manipulation, and beltway conventional wisdom. The fact remains: there was no credible evidence of a real threat from Iraq. In my mind, that is all anyone should have needed to preclude this entire devastating debacle. But then we live in a time when people seem surprised that a product like Airborne—created by a teacher! —doesn’t actually have any demonstrable health benefit outside the placebo effect. The destructive effects of this epidemic of acting based on pseudoscientific propaganda, gut feelings, and lizard-brain emotions of all sorts cannot be overestimated.