Amusing article Ok, I promised I'd lighten up on the Iraq stuff. But this article is just too amusing to pass up. It's written from the point of view of a semi-leftie, and though it misses a few key facts [1], it gets the brunt of the American public's emotion right. A sample:

Your arguments are rational, dear critics, but beside the point. There are now two Americas, a small one of intellectuals and doubters and a large one that craves revenge and has no patience for "sophistication," international law, the Security Council, pacifist allies, or false friends in the Gulf. Capitol Hill, most of it up for reelection, senses the angry nationalism and positions itself alongside the president. Just as the brilliant pundit Walter Lippmann criticized "containment" as an impossibly expensive strategy, many Lippmanns now step forward and explain why the Bush Doctrine cannot work. They may have Vernunft, but Bush, I regret to say (because I really don't like him), has Verstehen. (Respectively, reason and understanding. You knew that.) Where can the hurt and anger of 9/11 go? Inward, into guilt and self-loathing for alleged American wrongdoings? (If only we got to know other cultures!) Few Americans follow that path. Should we direct our anger at minorities of different appearance and religious faith? Although consonant with much of U.S. history, that is clearly the worst and most self-destructive way to go. No, the only feasible outlets for our rage are external ones, however oversimplified. Bush is drawn to a simplified unilateralism precisely because he is unsophisticated. Unfortunately, so are most Americans. The Bush Doctrine repudiates the deterrence strategy that got us through the Cold War. Ironically, back then many in the peace camp denounced deterrence as hawkish, dangerous, and unstable. Now the more tender-minded favor deterrence as a substitute for war: If it worked against Moscow, it can work against Baghdad. For Bush, deterrence is too mild and reactive. A wide swath of middle America never understood or liked deterrence. Now, without a superpower to fear, they abandon it in favor of simple, assertive preemption.

The last paragraph in particular is dead on. Deterrence is a last resort - you only use it if you've already failed by allowing your enemy to become as powerful as you. Only a fool would embrace deterrence when prevention is on the table, because deterrence is uncertain. What the left doesn't realize is that the choice now is between deterrence and prevention, while the choice during the Cold War was between deterrence and unilateral capitulation. And the author is also correct that the American public's motivation has a large component of hot vengeance alongside the stated motive of cold prevention. The desire for vengeance is the flip side of the "golden rule" (one of the universal components of human morality) and must have had adaptive value to become ubiquitous. Most likely this "adaptive value" arose from revenge's tendency to eliminate those who posed a threat to us in the past so that they will not pose a threat to us in the future. In other words, revenge should not be sneered at as a somehow "impure" motivation. Note also that we can no longer sustain hatred in good conscience...so revenge is all we have left. As for the inevitable incantation that "Al Qaeda is our enemy, not Hussein", I submit that every Arab state that funds terrorism and is hostile to our interests is our enemy, and controlling Iraq's oil gives us the leeway to deal with Saudi Arabia on our terms rather than theirs. [1] The author is totally wrong about the the possibility that "friendly governments would erupt in revolution". First of all, most Arab governments (e.g. Saudi Arabia) aren't really "friendly", and second of all, they won't erupt. As for the claim that "oil prices will shoot through the roof", that only might be true in the short run. In the long run, oil flow from Iraq will break the back of OPEC and result in far lower oil prices.