Drinking wine, wine wine, spotie otie.

One day, it will be worth writing something about principle versus palpability. I remember that my own initial disagreement with war in Iraq was connected to the illogic of the endeavor. That now joins the palpable tragedy of the endeavor.

Our experience in Iraq will one day be a useful discussion. I never felt that we should have allowed Hussein to rule as he did. I believe in our, the US, role in standing for our beliefs (in some fashion). For the very same reason, I am proud of our eventual stances in Bosnia, WWII, and am ashamed of our stagnency more than a couple countries on the African continent.

At the same time, I felt our war with Iraq was idiotic. The political environment leading to the war was oversimplified and stupified. If Vietnam was, as learned in my school days, a great mistake of our cold war...Iraq will be regarded as a great mistake of an administration PR-ing its way to war (be that true or no...it is the perception among a great many). Think about it. Iraq had no missiles pointed toward us. The atrocities of genocide (against which I would urge military action) were NOT on-going and were arguably preventable (in any event, the situation was quite distinct from the Balkans and Sudan).

so why? that is what so many of us askED and continue to ask. Except that, now that we are there, the ones of us that still believe in America's role as a global benevolent force want to urge the country to liberal democracy (small l and small d). Which leads us to that apparently unknown to the media and political ads grey area of war-criticism but staying in the country to fix the problem.

Anyway...I was thinking of the scene nearly three years ago when, according to the language of media polls, the war was supposedly "popular"

In our media's short term memory world, it is amazing to read from John Brady Kiesling's resignation letter from February 24, 2003. Kiesling was our diplomat to Athens. This is a bit:

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests.