The truly sad part is that we should all be on the same side in this war. Can you imagine where we would be if Kerry was lockstep with Bush on this issue and the media supported them both?

The even dumber part is that Kerry would have probably an even better chance at winning, since he'd have a hell of a lot more credibility on the issue when he said he had a better plan.

But when you can't stand up to Howard Dean...

Could someone explain to me why the nominated Kerry? I know they didn't have much to work with this time around, but still...

Kerry got the nod for lots of reasons. The Dean boomlet pushed the Democratic primaries so far left that Kerry, the most liberal of the three weaselly-on-the-war candidates (Edwards, Kerry, and Clark) was at the center of the primary electorate. Clark, Edwards, pro-war liberal Gephart, and Graham kept the pro-war vote from coallescing into Lieberman's camp. Evan Byah didn't run, so there wasn't a principled, relatively charismatic "New Democrat" in the race (though Edwards tried to play one on TV). Democratic primary voters have a bad habbit of thinking that status as a veteran gives automatic credibility on national defense. Oh, and Kerry had raised by far the most money by traditional channels.

Could someone explain to me why they nominated Kerry?

The grown-ups in the Democratic party decided to sit this one out. They knew they wouldn't make it through the activist dominated primaries, and Bush wasn't looking at all vulnerable back then. I always knew Dean was nothing; Internet Bubble candidate. But then I thought Gephardt would come in when reality set in.

I never thought it would turn out his way. I literally dismissed it watching the WTC burn. I had no doubt that there would be wartime consensus.

Can you imagine where we would be if Kerry was lockstep with Bush on this issue and the media supported them both?

IOW: "Wouldn't it be nice if this was Bulgaria?"

Jonah: I just watched John Kerry preen in front of the cameras about how "good diplomacy" would have prevented the mistake he voted for.

Having now watched three debates, I'm going to say that's a distortion. Kerry has pointed out that while he voted for the war, he also stressed to the president that he should explore all options instead of rushing to war.

If you can point to Kerry voting for the war and then not being promised that the president would explore all options or stressing to the president that he should explore all options, please let me know.

"Good diplomacy" in John Kerry's world would have let French and Russian politicians continue to line their pockets in the name of keeping Saddam in power

So, Jonah is saying we only had two choices: go to war, or continue to let Saddam bribe people.

Are those really the only two choices? Uncomfortable question time: would Eisenhower or Reagan consider those the only two choices? Kerry is not either of those, but perhaps we should expand this from the arena of false choices to whether Kerry would consider those the only two choices or whether he could consider more creative options.

In Simplistic thinking for complicated times I address thinking like that above in a general, non-Iraq specific way.

So, lonewhacko...

what, in your opinion, would the other choices be?

Oh, Regan and Ike are dead, so what they would think is, actually, irrelevant.

Will somebody please explain to Lonewacko that 12 years and 16 United fucking Nations Resolutions, plus another one before hitting the war switch, is not considered a rush to war.

By the way, I hope Jonah runs for president in 2008, or when he's old enough.

"... if it's in fact true that Bush offered no rationale for the war other than WMDs, why shouldn't we simply let Saddam out of his cage and put him back in office? We can even use some of the extra money from the Oil-for-Food program to compensate him for the damage to his palaces and prisons. Heck, if John Edwards weren't busy, he could represent him.

I'm serious."

Is the best truth said in this entire campaign. Don't you think so, Lonewacko.

is not considered a rush to war.

It'd be tonedeaf to think that how we went to war is considered a rush to war by the great majority of people around the world. Some people think our image matters, some don't. I'm in the former camp, and I frankly don't know how to convince those who are in the latter camp that they're wrong.

As for the other choices, is no one here able to come up with anything? I could reel off a couple, but how about someone else first?

Correction: "It'd be tonedeaf to think that how we went to war is NOT considered a rush to war by the great majority of people around the world."

Look.

Anybody who honestly believes that twelve years and seventeen UN resolutions constitutes a "rush to war" is a moron of such earth-shaking proportions that they should not be permitted to handle grown-up scissors. That there are a lot of these people doesn't make them any less a pack of gibbering fools.

Anybody who, knowing better, nevertheless apes the "rush to war" language out of political expediency (John Kerry, call your office) is a mendacious demagogue.

And anybody who insists that "image matters" to the point that we as a nation ought to seriously entertain pandering to the dishonest and the delusional is a fundamentally unserious individual.

Put into words much of what I've been thinking for two years.

I used to have some respect for Lonewacko, but since the first debate I have to wonder if somebody's been impersonating him.

"If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had conducted this war, you would be weeping joyously about Iraqi children going to school and women registering to vote."

And that, boys and girls, says it all. The rest of the article is mere frosting on the cake.

LONEW: "Some people think our image matters, some don't. I'm in the former camp, "

Me too. But the image I want the world to have of Americans in general and the US President in particular, the image that matters, the image they should understand *is* the image of the movie cowboy.

A cowboy can take the first punch without falling down, but then he wins the fight.

A cowboy fights fair -- he doesn't respond to a punch by drawing his pistol.

But a cowboy doesn't wait for his opponent to "clear leather", either. If somebody "goes for the gun" the movie cowboy draws quicker, aims straighter, and amazes the onlookers with the awesome precision of his gun-handling.

A movie cowboy knows that sometimes, sadly, the sherrif is in league with the cattle baron or other forces of evil. Sometimes a cowboy has to choose between obeying the law; submitting to authority -- or doing the right thing. In such circumstances the cowboy spits upon the law -- he always chooses to do the right thing. (Speaking of spitting: A cowboy's attitude toward tobacco, liquor, guns -- and morphine -- isn't founded firmly on legalities, either.)

The movie cowboy doesn't really want to live in town and be sherrif for a timid bunch of fat bankers, gimpy bartenders, slick gamblers, scruffy miners and painted dance hall girls. He'd like nothing better than to hand over the badge to somebody else --and ride on in pursuit of the next frontier. But there are kids, and the schoolmarm, the circuit-riding preacher and that youngster in the general store with the dime novel in his pocket, a .22 in his saddleholster and a dangerously quixotic gleam in his eye ... so a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

A cowboy may surprise you with a quote from the King James Bible or a line or two from Shakespeare. His faith is deeper than he lets on. His appreciation of bawdy entertainments is raucous. But in either case, alone by the watchfire or by a dim and flaring lamp, the movie cowboy is liable to pull a battered book from his pockets to engage in a dialog with minds of generations gone, seeking lessons worthy to pass on to his own descendants.

You can have your ninja, your samurai, your viking, your paladin, your land-knecht, your vandal, hun, mongol, visigoth or aristocratic serf-abusing religous crusader rampaging back and forth across Eurasia looting and plundering, raping, pillaging, impaling, crucifying, enslaving, did I mention raping?, burning starving and destroying the very civilisations and societies that engendered them -- all to the merry madrigals of the bards paid to spin the history. Fine. Great. That foreign shit can make for dandy movies, too.

Like, when Bing Crosby shows up --whistling -- as the Connecticutt Cowboy, er, Yankee in King Arthur's court -- who shows the knights-on-horseback how to use a lasso... and a revolver.

Yeah, even Connecticutt! Birth place of the Shrub. Cowboys aren't just Texans, y'all. Ever see the movie where James Garner teaches the natives how to ranch -- teaches 'em in Hawaii? Do you have any idea how much beef is raised in New Jersey, New York, and New Hampshire? That you can walk into shops from Key West to Whidbey Island and buy boots, spurs, a hat -- and yes, a six gun?

Yeah, the image is important. We're cowboys, and they can call us that.

But they'd better be smiling when they do...

Yeah, lonewacko. I guess we let Hitler invade three countries, build up his military, build long range rockets, and cement his alliances before we took action in WWII.

We went along with the UN in Korea and ended up with the poster child for failed states...a line of unstable dictators in a virtually uninvadable country with a trememdous conventional army and nuclear weapons. And about 25 million people and a US division under the guns of its thousands of artillery pieces.

Is that your version of the "global test" for US intervention? Go along with the UN and global consensus until an adversary become so powerful that it's a danger to the entire world and within a hair of being unable to stop at all? Yeah, great idea.

Very nice, Pouncer.

You forget about NK using starvation as a weapon. Invade and there will be a refugee problem that pales the small possibility of a nuclear threat (starvation on mass scale in the spotlight, relocation of thousands of people who have not known freedom for generations, agents hiddend among refugees). One ally in this, the Chinese, put 150,000 soldiers on the border just last year to help curb the current refugee problem.

Pouncer... you sir are a poet and a scholar. And you also point out one of the most ironic items in this entire "cowboy in the whitehouse" line of attack from foreign nations and elitist in this country. The cowboy is an iconic symbol in this country, for all the reasons you cite. The foreigners and leftist in this country think it is an insult, when it actually is considered a compliment. Shows just how out of touch many of them are.

So, anyway, anyone have an answer to the question above? Were there only two choices, either invade as Bush did or give in to the corrupt U.N./Europeans? Surely, someone can come up with other possibilities.

As for Bush being a cowboy, I don't think the image he projects around the world is that of a good ol' American cowboy in the Reagan mold. Rather, he's the jumpy, plain-speaking but plain-thinking version like one might find working at a gas station ten miles outside Alamogordo, NM.

You might want to read this.: A small group of IR scholars called the Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy have amassed 650 signatures from international relations scholars in the United States and allied countries to sign an open letter blasting the Bush administration's foreign policy... Before anyone starts claiming that this is just an example of radical academics engaging in Bush-bashing, they should check out the list of signatories. There are some scholars on the list who would be considered by mainstream Americans to be "out there" in their beliefs, but there are also a wide array of realists, rational choice theorists, democratization activists, area experts, and liberal institutionalists. I concur with Henry Farrell -- this is a group that cannot be lightly dismissed...

So, anyway, anyone have an answer to the question above? Were there only two choices, either invade as Bush did or give in to the corrupt U.N./Europeans? Surely, someone can come up with other possibilities.

Go ahead.

ps: re the academics- dig up a pre-1980 prediction of the USSR's collapse by 1995, and I'll take them seriously. Otherwise, consider them dismissed. With ~650 people on the list, surely at least one of them got it right....

Great column by Jonah, but he's wrong in one tiny respect. Tony Blair is regularly referred to as 'Tony Bliar' here is Jollie Olde England. In fact there is a iconic journalist who has made his career from repeating two themes. Blair Lied and Bush Barbarian. I refer to the Universally Esteemed Robert Fisk of course. Twit.