The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by RKB:

Sigh.

14 other members of the UN voted to resume inspections and then, depending on the results of those inspections, determine an appropriate course of action. The inspectors said they were finding no evidence of WMD, and would need more time. The administration disagreed with this appraisal.

Please do not forget that significantly fewer than 14 nations would have concurred, had the administration actually had the courage to put the "go to war" resolution to a vote. Instead, Bush chose to "boldly" bypass the UN and just go ahead and invade anyway; hence a certain reluctance from other countries (India, recently) to help clean up the mess. Did Bush alone convince them that war was the best solution? Obviously not.

So you don't get to invade Iraq if inspections go on forever, and you don't invade on old intelligence. You've don't actually have to declare war or anything, but you still need to present a case for sending American troops to invade a sovereign nation. Nobody disputes the fact that Hussein was a very bad man who did very bad things. There are many such leaders in the world, but you can't start a war with that argument.

The case that was most compelling -- and that was punctuated by the possiblity of a nuclear attack -- was that Hussein was poised on the brink with his weapons. Not that, given time, he "he could rebuild his arsenal," but that if we didn't take him out now he'd take us out. This was the approach taken by this administration and no other. Read the STOTU again -- he talks repeatedly about "defending the peace." This was sold as a war to protect America, not to stabilize the Middle East.

One could consider this all to be "quibbling" only if there was actually even the merest shred of evidence that there were ANY actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The fact that there haven't been any discoveries, coupled with the urgent pre-invasion rhetoric from the administration ("we can't wait for the inspectors to look EVERYWHERE because we KNOW he's got them and MIGHT USE THEM any minute now") makes this a valid point of contention.

In other words, if the intelligence was so flawless, where are the WMD? And if, as recent debate suggests, the intelligence maybe wasn't so perfectly accurate on this one "minor" point, perhaps it's worth investigating whether or not any of the other points were equally flawed.

Other people have made a far more compelling case against torture here than I could. I can almost understand Oliver's point if the only people who were ever tortured were people who had committed heinous crimes themselves. An eye for an eye. I would still disagree with the technique, but I'd be closer to understanding it an a world that black and white.

But the reality is that we would also be torturing suspected Al Qaeda members. Some of them might even be American citizens, unlawfully detained, thanks to Ashcroft. Some might very well be completely innocent.

So. What if the lies these people tell just to (please god) make it stop move us farther from the truth? What, then? If you're going to be cool with torturing Al Qaeda, you're also going to have to be cool with torturing innocent people. Collateral damage. Can't drop a bomb on a city and not expect to kill a few innocent civilians, too.

I wouldn't expect sympathy for (known) members of Al Qaeda, but torturing "enemy combatants" goes far beyond that.

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