But it looks like others are ready to jump ship. I’m the one not looking to jump ship.
Look, I don’t know what the hell the administration thinks it is doing pissing on many of our allies’ legs, but that doesn’t go to what I think the justification for taking out Saddam is. I believe that we will deal with him now or deal with him later. For a whole host of reasons I don’t believe deterrence will work. While Saddam may not be crazy, he isn’t very smart and deterrence requires full rationality on the part of an opponent and from his past actions it is clear that Saddam is not capable of processing information well.
Once I concluded deterrence is highly unlikely to work the question then becomes is there reason to wait? Well, usually there would be, but he is pursing weapons that would make any future conflict harder to fight.
I never had any illusions about Bush giving a damn about democracy (nor about Clinton’s fumbling in Europe as Daniel Drezner points out). Cleaning up Bush’s mess in Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan (just wait) and several other Arab countries will fall to his successor. However, I’d rather have him get Saddam out of the way to make that fight less bloody and less calamitous.
By far, I’d like Dick Lugar, Bob Dole or John McCain executing this war and cleaning up after. Clearly, in any of those three cases we wouldn’t have alienated our allies and screwed up bribing Mexico and Turkey. And I’d have more trust in the post war Iraqi order. But I’m stuck with Bush.