For the first time in a long time, over Thanksgiving I actually talked politics with a staunch conservative - don't you love crazy distant relatives by marraige? Nothing I learned will be revelatory here, but I thought I'd point out what really crystallized for me during the debate. At least as far as foreign policy/terrorism/Iraq go, there are really only two things separating us from them. Everything else follows.
The first is that it is morally acceptable to invade countries in the Middle East just because our economy, as currently structured, relies upon cheap oil to continue growing.
The second is that Arabs are, in effect, all the same.
The first of these struck me particularly, because in public no conservative would ever admit that it doesn't really matter whether Iraq was a threat or was involved in terrorism or anything, just the fact that we had a chance to secure more oil for ourselves makes Iraq okay. This was half of what it came down to, however. Our economy relies upon cheap oil. The Arabs could, in theory, hold us hostage by sabotaging our economy on a grand scale, and so our national interest justifies us occupying part of the oil territories.
When the second argument came up, I called it racist straight up. He came back with a particularly ironic reply, which was that it's not racism, it's just that all these people understand is force, so if that's what we need to use, then so be it. I talked about how Saudi Arabia is the biggest state sponsor of radical Islamic indoctrination and how we were attacked by terrorits based in Afghanistan, and how the roots of the Islamic terrorist problem run pretty deep, and involve lots of things like poverty and oppression and 20th century history, as well as culture and Islam. These weren't even taken to be relevant to the argument over whether we should have attacked Iraq. The argument, in effect, was that we were attacked by Arab muslims, enough said. Invading Afghanistan wasn't enough because that's a backwater nation with no oil, so no one really cared if we occupied it, and we needed to make waves in response to 9/11. The best target was Iraq, so that's where we went.
This argument just reminded me that we can debate whether the attack made sense strategically, or whether it was justified morally, or whether it's going very well or is likely to end with any kind of acceptable outcome for 4 more years, but the debate ended before we even started talking.