Originally Posted by roachboy

this again....

i do not see why the wmd matter can be understood as "simplistic" given that it was central to bush's arguments for war.

which reverts to the problem of the american presentation before the unsc--which cannot really be interpreted as opposing the countries who "wanted to do something about terrorism" and those "which did not"--instead, you had a fundamental disagreement about which version of reality to accept--that generated by the un inspections teams as over against that generated by us/uk intel and visions of which way to proceed--multilaterally versus unilaterally.

the administration failed to persuade on either count--except obviously for american conservatives.


not a single of the general explanations for war offered above constitutes an element of a justification for how the bush administration chose to act in the real world--not one element would function to legitimate the treatment the neocons accorded the un at the time or since; not one of them would constitute a reason for going outside the institutional and legal framework set up to deal with iraq in the cadre of the un.

not one.

because for these explanations to have had weight, they would have had to compel the security council to act as a body. and they did not--perhaps because the bush case for war was, in the parlance of our times, bullshit?

so the tactic since has been obvious--amazingly so:

since the neocons lost in the un, it follows that they should try to erase the un politically, given that for them politics is the domain most suited to the presentation of their fantasies as if they described the world.

because in the end the question is only secondarily how you, onetime (for example), rationalize your personal support for the war.
rather what is at issue is how you understand what the administration did, in the contexts that situate/bind it in the world.