Dying veteran's F-U letter to Bush and Cheney

[We Come In Peace]

Actually, it implies no such thing. It's nothing more than a thought experiment designed to get anyone who wants to argue the relative morality of aggressive conquest vs. preemptive war thinking about "At what point does aggression become preemptive, given a specified threat assessment."

 

And it's a perfectly valid analogy in this case, because if you'll recall, the administration's argument wasn't just "Iraq has WMDs," it was "Iraq has WMDs and poses an imminent threat to the security of the United States." So the analogy of Japanese carriers sailing to Pearl Harbor, and presumption of clear intel of such, is not only accurate but goes beyond the issue of Saddam's possession or lack of WMDs: if you know that an adversary has weapons that pose a threat, and have intel that they intend to use them, at what point does attacking them become a valid act of defense?

 

In other words: even if Saddam had WMDs, the war still may not have been a valid act of defense. The issue of the WMDs is primarily a straw man distracting from the proper use of military force to begin with.

 

(And yes, I did say as much at the time. I've never wavered from the belief that the war was an act of aggression and not defensive, even if all the intel was true and accurate.)

I remember and appreciated your thoughtful posts on the issue as much then as I do now. Now, my posts on the issue back then... yeeesh. (Rodney Dangerfield collar pull)

 

Cheers.