Back in the heady days of 2003, a big story emerged: WAR, on Saddam, again, in large 72 point type. Though it was already the age of terror alerts, a few timid souls did manage to pipe up, "Why war? Why Iraq? Why so fast?" and the question was echoed shyly by the press and then cravenly by the congress, anxious to cloud their misgivings with an image of being strong on something.
Under this pressure, the war proponents reluctantly advanced a picture of sorts. Not a sterling portrait presented in toto, but a barrage of small rationalizations, segmented arguments. The pieces kept coming, not from very many angles, but certainly one at a time: oil for food was failing (and the vile French were capitalizing on the failure); we had some hanging responsibility for that country; Saddam's just a bastard; and those WMDs! threats of Nigerian yellowcake, suggestive sattelite photos, imminent mushroom or toxic clouds, mobile weapons labs, white powder vials, and it's worth it to know for sure anyway; those possible connections to Al Qaida (and let's face it, they're all filthy Arabs); freeing up some oil supply; we've got this perfectly good new military strategy just sitting around; you don't question the president during war; validating our kickass American pride; sticking up for the hated and feckless U.N.; and, lest we ever forget, pitting us good guys versus pure fucking unadulterated, unpasteurized, Kurd-gassing, people-starving, torturing, swamp-draining, dissident-purging, faith-marginalizing, rape-rooming, child-killing, capital-E
Evil which we'd vanquish with good ole American whoopass and the promise of democracy which would in turn spread like crabgrass through the parched middle eastern lawn.
Few of those fragments could stand on their own as universally accepted dealbreakers, but when laid out appropriately, the picture they were building toward could be deciphered. Much like a jigsaw puzzle filled in tile by tile, when enough of it was put together, a sort of gestalt transformation occurred. Suddenly a picture was there, and it really was a grave and gathering--or maybe even imminent--threat, just like they were saying all along. Yes there were some keystones, the WMD points mostly, that were the critical face pieces needed to hold the image together for the less imaginative (such as our representatives, who were so ballsy as to put some really bold footnotes on the bottom of their blank check), but most of them on their own were only a swirl of suggestive colors, the parts being less than their sum, as they say.
Admittedly, it wasn't so much like a chain of reasoning as a regression--a trend inferred from the preponderance of bits. You didn't have to connect the dots, so much as fit a line to them, but you still needed a bunch of logical ANDs to reveal the hidden image. Saddam had to be after chemical weapons AND he had to be defying the U.N. AND he had to be bogarting that oil for any direction to be manifested in those scattered points. Otherwise, all those dots would look all uncorrelated and sort of meaningless. You could take a few away and still observe the trend (especially if they were those outliers which don't support your expectations) but you still would need some minimum number of them to be true in order to convince the sour old referees of history that a legitimate picture was really there all along.
But something's been happening to the whole puzzling rationale. Somewhere between "mission accomplished" and "G-SAVE" that sequence of logical ANDs morphed into one great big logical OR. As various of those pieces turned out to be upside-down, placed wrongly, or forced in--that face you thought you had was really a bowl of cauliflower or something--the criteria sort of shifted. No longer we're looking at a picture suggested from an assemblage of parts, we're now looking for any of the fractional arguments to be true in order to validate the whole. No WMD? Hey, we're building democracy, so it's OK.
How many pieces are we down to?
Anyone can draw a trendline using two data points (instilling democracy and faith in our motives look like the survivors to me), but the observation loses something in the honesty department. As far as rationalizations go, it looks like the last throes of desparation to me, or it would if I thought the justification meant so very much to the guys who started it.
Keifus