Q for the conservatives: what is more important, re: Iraq?

This has the potential for being much worse than Vietnam. Why? Because unlike the previous war, there is no clear enemy. Noone to fight, no pitched battles really, patrols get you... nothing. This is even less of a 'war' than that one was supposed to be.

It's tough on the troops, it's tough on the whole situation, and if we're not careful, things could get really bad in a region that has been known to send people abroad to blow things up quite a bit. Not a fun concept. Perhaps we should, I don't know, work on securing the borders at least a little here at home?

Cycloptichorn

Have you read the UN Development Report on the Arab world? It's written by an invited, but independent and rather pluriform group of Arab intellectuals from around the region. As such, it does not present the "European view" itself, but it is one that most European actors you reference have embraced in interest if not unanimous approval. It is simultaneously very brave in its uncompromising criticisms of not just the current Arab governments, but systemic flaws in current Muslim/Arab society and culture (especially in the first parts) - and representative of an approach highly different from that espoused by the neoconservatives in the US (especially in the last parts). (Consequently, the poor authors have of course incurred the wrath of both their own governments, the Muslim fundamentalists and the US - which I would consider a recommendation.)

As for myself, I have made the case you ask for several times at length on these forums (including in some posts you praised yourself, I seem to remember), so I won't take up your invitation to go through the moves again. I do recognize that your views are generally consistent enough to be easily summarised in a mid-sized post of a roughly similar mould that successfully encapsulates the prior arguments, but mine don't seem to work quite that way. I remember, however, an interesting discussion with IronLionZion on democracy and the Arab world and how best to combat the threat of Islamist extremism in the context of the problems you signal in, I believe, the Guantanamo ("Camp Xray") thread, from page 17 or so onwards; and several on the Roundtable discussions I joined, notably this one on the origins of terrorism (from page 2 onward). But most practically, perhaps, I apparently summarized some of what I said in both those threads on this specific topic in this post on Adrian's How do you win a "War On Terror"? thread, continuing the discussion from there.

It is of course not at all "simply a fact" that George's opponents in this world debate have shirked the burden of coming up with alternative plans and approaches. Despite George's rather facile putdown of me as "one who, himself, accepts no complimentary burden of argument" - which is demonstrably false, as shown by my previous posts around this board on the topic, like the ones I just linked in - the only way George could have succeeded in "not yet seeing one" example of a "general approach to these coupled problems" is by somehow consistently ignoring what's been written about the subject outside America. Not just have - purely on the political, legal level - other countries responded to the US-proposed new UN resolution on Iraq with one of their own, there is of course also a sizable body of academic and political-essayistic work on the issue. If George has seen nothing that passes the "laugh test", then I can only assume that either he laughs at everything all too different from his own take on things (which seems unlikely, considering past conversations) or he's been too pre-occupied lately to look much beyond places like A2K or perhaps the latest MoveOn appeal.

<shrugs, done with this kind of thing already>

Nimh,

I recognize the content you have put forward on this subject on other threads. My intent was not to offend or diminish what you have done or said here. You asked specific questions about the relative values of alternatives from the conservative perspective. I answered by saying that this could not accurately be done, but by refering to the various, coupled arguments for our intervention. My position on this may be a bit different from others in that I never considered the WMD matter as a particular driver, except as it was considered the only argument our friends on the Security Council would acknowledge.

While you and others have provided exhaustive arguments showing defects in the U.S. rationalizations for the war, I don't recall much on the general subject of containing Moslem fanaticism and/or redirecting the political evolution of Moslem countries, or for the stabilization of the Mideast and persian Gulf. It was this to which I referred.