Roberts is right on this, just as he’s right about immigration, the economy, and left-wing dominance in the universities. The point is, Iraq _isn’t_ able to deliver weapons of mass destruction to the United States. There is simply no evidence to date that he can, despite all of the hysterical warnings we see in the neoconservative press.

I don’t think Mr. Auster was saying that Roberts is wrong about, e.g., immigration as an independent topic. I think he was saying that just because immigration is a war on the West it is a non sequiter to suggest that there are therefore no other wars on the West. William seems to suggest that because Roberts is (presumably) right on several topics he is therefore right on Iraq. That is rather like claiming that because I am good at painting houses I can diagnose disease, and the Roberts article made a point akin to saying that just because there is flu going around I shouldn’t wear my seatbelt.

Mr. Auster’s brief is of course completely formal, as the title suggests. None of this says anything about what substantive arguments there are or are not for the impending attack, it merely points out a class of arguments from the Roberts article which are formally irrational.

I think Roberts is right on the impending war on Iraq just as I think he’s right on a host of other topics. I did not say that just because he’s right on immigration that he’s right on the war on Iraq; one does not necessarily follow from the other. That’s your (mis)interpretation, not mine. You need to read my comments more carefully. I think Roberts’ point is that the need for a war on Iraq is less urgent than the need for, say, border controls and immigration reform. I happen to agree with him. Tell us, have the neoconservatives reached the point where they don’t even need a good reason to bomb a country to smithereens?

In the Palestinian case, relative poverty and powerlessness is used to explain and excuse terrorism. Many liberals seem to think that terrorist resistance is the inevitable consequence of those conditions.

This time, however, the liberals’ favorite line of argument works against the conclusion they want to establish.

Matt is of course correct that my post addressed the glaring weaknesses in Robert’s logic, not his substantive position against a war on Iraq.

Further, I’d like to say to William that his arguments would carry more weight if he stopped portraying those dread bogeymen the neoconservatives as the sole advocates of a war. Of course it is true that many of the war advocates are neocons. But, as anyone following the issue can tell, support for a war is far wider than that. However, perhaps what William really means is that anyone supporting a war is, by definition, a neocon. That certainly seems to be his attitude toward me. A couple of months ago he couldn’t praise my articles enough. Then, solely because I tilted in favor of a war on Iraq, he began referring to me disparagingly as a “neoconservative,” a charge so patently silly that it undercuts much else of what he has to say.

My point is, it would be more effective argumentation to address the substance of each particular issue, rather than using a label like “neocon” as an all-purpose club against whatever it is one doesn’t like.

I think the point is clear. Roberts compares the threat from “23 million relatively poor and uneducated people” in Iraq to the threat from thousands if not millions of hostile people in our own country who have escaped even the most rudimentary scrutiny from counter-terrorism specialists.

It illustrates perfectly what I take to be the gist of Roberts’s column: “Sound arguments can be made that the focus on Iraq is preventing more serious vulnerabilities from being addressed. Terrorists abroad do us less damage than the terrorists allowed into our country by our open-borders policy.”

Now, you can disagree, but to say it is somehow “illogical” is, in my view, absurd. No one, including Roberts, is arguing that Iraq does not represent a threat to the US at some level. What is being argued is that greater threats do exist, that there are different grades of threats, if you will. Roberts says that Iraq occupies a lower level of priorities than do border control and anti-American academics.

Yes, of course I realize that neoconservatives are not the “sole advocates of a war”. I never said they were. My position is this: Not all warmongers are neoconservatives, but most neoconseravtives are warmongers. Is that a generalization? You bet.

And yes, Lawrence, I greatly admire your writings on race and immigration. That’s what you do best. You need a bigger audience for them. But as I’ve said before, I think you’re off-base when it comes to advocating war on Iraq.

The drumbeats of war have never required a good reason. It does not follow that war is never necessary. I think William’s concern about neoconservative imperialism is more than legitimate, and I think there is some truth to the notion that although Saddam is an evil man, he was not our enemy until we made him our enemy. I’ll include myself in the “we” because I had a less objective view myself during Gulf War I, although I expect that some folks like William have been consistently against U.S. imperialism for decades unlike myself. And the fact that the Left attempts to invalidate America as a people based on her imperfections — another clear case of non sequiter — does not imply that America as a people hasn’t been wrong, sometimes badly and sometimes deliberately. A broken clock is right twice a day and all that.

Any war with Iraq will in fact encourage neocon imperialism. Any successful prosecution of war will unquestionably have that as a strong negative side effect. That doesn’t mean that war with Iraq will not keep a terrorist nuke out of New York, though, at least for a time. We have to take today as it is, not as we would like it to be, and even if we contributed to the problems ourselves. The idea that we can’t defend our lives and homes from our enemies is not validated by the fact that we did not have to have them as enemies in the first place, and it is that notion — not the notion that we are far from perfect, because we ARE far from perfect — that needs to be refuted.

There seems to be this sense of idealized innocence and guilt in the attempts to justify various courses of action here. The fact that America has made mistakes, some of them grevious (this applies to all human beings and institutions, ever) and some even deliberately grevious does not imply that America can no longer take any legitimate actions whatsoever, as the Left would have it. The categorical idealized distinction between oppressor-tyrant and oppressed innocence is rarely the case in the real world, and that includes cases in which we are party. The more people believe in that categorical distinction the more innocents end up being oppressed, though, ironically enough. If you believe in death camps your faith in them gives rise to them. The world would be a better place if everyone paid more attention to the planks in their own eyes; if in stead of beating the drums of a “right to property” we instead embraced “thou shalt not steal.”

I’ve mentioned my own take on Iraq in other comments, so this may be redundant. I think that William’s substantive concerns are quite valid, that a succesful campaign will encourage neocon imperialism even if the campaign is warranted, and the truth of the matter is that keeping nukes from Saddam implicates keeping them from a whole host of other despots as well. It is not likely that this will be done effectively, nor even that there is a morally good way to do it effectively. But if it is not done effectively, the chances of seeing mushroom clouds over U.S. cities in the next few decades are not immaterial.

The apparent religious devotion to one side of what is clearly a difficult prudential issue is what troubles me in the Iraq discussion, especially within a group of such generally reasonable men.

Roberts wrote:

“War hawks believe that a demonstration of U.S. military clout would improve the Middle Eastern situation. But Israel has been demonstrating clout for decades and is still engulfed by terrorism.”

This sort of reasoning is part of the problem, whether or not it is illogical. Those favoring preemptive war will rightfully point out that it is a non sequiter, as demonstrated by British and Russian failures in Afghanistan followed by U.S. “success” just as an example. The reality is that what Roberts portrays as a logical situation is in fact a prudential situation. I don’t think that helps. Defeat is always possible and often likely, but if you want to convince people not to fight — or to fight a different enemy — then it doesn’t help matters to put up easily refuted straw men.

It may be interesting to see how this:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/807075.asp

turns out.

William quotes what he calls the gist of Robert’s column and says that, whether you disagree or not, it is not illogical:

“Sound arguments can be made that the focus on Iraq is preventing more serious vulnerabilities from being addressed. Terrorists abroad do us less damage than the terrorists allowed into our country by our open-borders policy.”

Of course I agree that the focus on Iraq is diverting attention from very serious unaddressed problems such as immigration. I further believe that we cannot have a serious “war on terror” without a complete overhaul of U.S. immigration policy. But the shameful, horrible inadequacies of Bush’s policy in this regard have absolutely no bearing on whether or not a war on Iraq is, indeed, necessary. War critics continually fudge the main issue. The issue is Hussein’s possible possession of a deliverable nuclear weapon or other WMD that could be used to blackmail us or be carried to the U.S. by terrorists and detonated in an American city. Of course, better immigration controls would make it harder for terrorists to get such a weapon into the country. But would Roberts and William let our security in such a matter depend solely on border control?

To repeat, Roberts is making valid points about immigration and the anti-American culture in the universities. But those points are irrelevant to the question of what to do about the danger of Hussein’s possessing deliverable WMD. Roberts’s argument about the proposed war on Iraq is therefore illogical.

It should be obvious that any security policy must rest on secure borders and immigration reform. We have neither. The main job of the central government is too keep the country safe, and it has failed in this respect. Instead, the Bush administration is preparing the country for another potentially disastrous foreign adventure. Am I the only one who thinks we can’t put the cart before the horse? Anyway, you’ve identified the main weakness in the war advocate’s position: the lack of credible evidence that 1) Saddam Hussein possesses WMDs capable of hitting the United States and 2) Iraqi involvement in 9/11. I more than willing to shift my position in light of new evidence. I just haven’t seen it yet.

As a follow-up to my previous comment, let’s put the issue in even starker terms. The evidence is that Bush positively favors more and more Hispanics and Muslims and other non-Europeans coming to America and changing it into an entirely different society, as long as they do it nonviolently. In other words, Bush’s policy on immigration is not just inadequate, as I said earlier, but, in a cultural sense, treasonous. He is not on the side of preserving a recognizable American nation. He is not on our side. Yet all of that is irrelevant to the question of what to do about the possibility of Hussein’s developing an atomic bomb and transferring it to terrorists to deliver it into New York Harbor. If that threat is real, and if Bush recognizes it and is prepared to stop it, then I support Bush. If Paul Roberts does not recognize the threat and opposes doing anything about it, then I oppose Roberts, even though I agree with him about the threats to our culture.

Is that so hard to understand?

As for William’s demand for credible evidence, what would satisfy him? Should we wait until Hussein is actually in possession of nuclear bombs and uses them to blackmail us? The whole history of the last ten years points to the conclusion that Hussein is developing such weapons and their delivery systems and may be very close to having them. Bush’s policy—the policy we are debating—is not about waiting for Hussein to have such weapons and then taking action. It’s about stopping him before he does.

Hey, Auster, so how do you differ from the neocons you profess to challenge? Shall we also invade Syria? Libya? How about Turkey, that longstanding enemy of Christendom?

Why does meddling in the Middle East benefit US national interest?

Apparently some folks think that the defining characteristic of a neocon is a particular sort of foreign policy. I don’t think that works. I think William’s earlier statement to the effect that neocons will generally support invasion is true. I think that being for an invasion of Iraq is not sufficient in itself to make one a neocon, though. Unless someone can show how favoring an Iraq invasion is _sufficient_ to make one a neocon it seems like just a slur to me. I await the intellectual synthesis that allows one to make that claim without it being a slur.

In general there seems to be basic logic problems in here. If favoring a preemptive invasion of Iraq is sufficient to place one in the category “neocon” then the Kurds are neocons. If having something in common with a group is sufficient to make one a member of the group then I am an astronaut.