IRAQ: It's the Proportionality, Stupid

[Presstitutes]

Good piece from Salon:

http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=5e6c1beb-6d3b-4058-b373-a72ea6d5ec3d

It's the Proportionality, Stupid: With the debate about the Iraq debate raging, the lying about the lying, the rationalizing of the rationale, the rewriting of the rewritten, the un-American accusations of un-Americanism, the entire Iraq issue is really much simpler than the uproar would suggest. In a word, the administration's actions and words were out of proportion to the magnitude, urgency, and primacy of the threat.

It wasn't about how many people believed Saddam had WMD. Many did. It wasn't about the world changing after 9/11. It did. It wasn't a question of Saddam's brutality. Everyone knew how brutal he was. It was about the b.s. It was about the rhetoric not matching the reality. Sometimes it doesn't take access to classified material or secret memos or intelligence briefings, or abstruse arguments about foreign policy and national security and military strategy. Sometimes it just takes a good b.s. detector to know you're being conned. During the run-up to the invasion, the war's opponents operated on a simple principle: if it walks like a bull and snorts like a bull, it's probably bull.

Bush, Condi, Cheney and Rummy's grim-faced, apocalyptic pronouncements were like something out of a third rate horror flick. Talk of mushroom clouds from Iraq while North Korea and Iran flaunted their nuclear programs unanswered defied credulity. And talk of an enormous invasion and occupation - starting with shock and awe - on humanitarian grounds, while places like Darfur experience mass slaughter and children starve and die of preventable diseases unaided across the planet and other dictators rule unchecked, well, that wasn't believable then and it isn't now..

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the position of the anti-war crowd like this: "Here we were, more than a decade after the first gulf war, two years after 9/11, and Saddam hadn’t attacked us, he hadn’t threatened to attack us. And then suddenly, he was the biggest threat to America. A threat that required a massive invasion. A bigger threat than Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Bin Laden. A HUGE, IMMEDIATE threat. It simply defied belief. What’s amazing is that anyone bought into it." There were moments during Bush's wild-eyed speeches that many Americans wanted to look him in the eye and say, "you really expect us to believe that?" If you make doomsday predictions and take the country to war on the basis of those predictions, at least make them realistic.

Now that millions more Americans have copped on to the con job, and cold, hard reality has turned their gaze inward, we're seeing pro-war bloggers and pundits and politicians come unhinged. We're getting heart-tugging rhetoric about terror and freedom and liberation. We're being warned not to rewrite history. We're seeing a furious effort to stop the inexorable solidification of conventional wisdom.

But in the end, it boils down to proportionality. The mark of a false statement is the dissonance between the statement and reality. The greater the dissonance, the bigger the falsehood. Millions of Americans sensed the disconnect between the administration's hair-raising Iraq prognostications and what they saw with their own eyes. And millions more are seeing the disconnect now. Sadly, it's too late for the thousands who've lost their lives....and the thousands more who will until this nightmare is brought to an end.

[afdip]

1. good article . . . proportionality is a good argument

[HawkerHurricane]

2. The word I use is "Priortizing".

Sure, Saddam should have been on our list of 'things to do' (Hunt down Bin Laden, since he's in Afghanistan we can overthrow the Taliban while we're there, get a good solution to the Palastine/Isreali mess, see if we can do something about Darfur, Somalia's still a disaster, Zaire's a mess, and oh, yeah, Saddam...). The problem was not whether or not to overthrow Saddam, but what priority the effort should be. It never should have been made #1 on the hit parade. It was a waste of time, treasure and manpower better spent on priority #1 after 9/11, getting Bin Laden and eliminating the Al Queda organization (getting the Taliban was part of priority #1 ONLY because that's where Bin Laden was... if Bin Laden was in Somalia, we should have gone to Somalia and threw out the warlords).

Iraq is not part of the "War on Terror". It's a sideshow.

[NNN0LHI]

3. I think its a lot more simple

We just can't get away with killing Iraqis to help them any longer. This dog is not hunting any more.

Don