The Open Matt Project

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From my Comments:
"There's a good article in The New Yorker this week about the neo-conservative's view / argument for US imperialism. Also explains why it hasn't worked out as much as they'd hoped - namely the state's power is supposed to be *checked* by the populus in order to give it credibility and keep it from sinking into the inevitable darkness of tyranny. (The state being the United States of the World.) Funny, how groups of wise men always seem to think that they will be the exception to this rule... but human beings instincts haven't dulled over yet. The voters can still smell."

Assuming the article mentioned is 100% correct, "hasn't worked out as much as they hoped" is significantly better than the alternative: 9/11 II. Like I've said before, Al-Qaida didn't start attacking us on 9/11 - they stopped.

8 years of Clinton (and frankly I'm not sure if he would have had much choice due to the unpopular nature of war in general) demonstrated a reluctance to defend ourselves, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. It took thousands of dead Americans and assaults on our core institutions on our own soil to wake up enough people to the fact that there was a real danger.

No matter how much the Liberati want to paint this war as an "imperial march" (you should look up imperialism, btw), the fact remains that enough of our country wanted to go to war to defend ourselves from a clear, present, and growing danger. As a result, Al-Qaida's on the run, with their members being captured or killed. At long last, Iraq has been liberated from Saddam Hussein's regime, if not yet from their own limitations. The disasterous option of containment, the popular alternative to this war one hears about constantly, has finally been retired.

I am still waiting to hear proposals for what should be done, and then responses to the evidence for those proposals not working before. It's easy to criticize, it's hard to create.

Of course things aren't working out as well as planned - but is inaction a superior alternative?

Follow up to some of the comments:

Regarding the "lies", as usual, I like to see what both sides have to say instead of just parroting what the righteous have put out that week.

Jonah Goldberg from The Washington Times writes about lies
Spinsanity on "imminent threat"

And for those of us who listen and/or believe in David Kay, who is currently the most knowledgable person on Earth about Iraq WMD, his recent report to the Senate is a must-read.

From Kay's report to the Senate (which I was lucky enough to watch in its entirety on C-SPAN, btw):
"As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections. It's typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.

In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."

And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that, at least to the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to take that position.

It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had -- the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.

And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that.

We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that."

I fear that no matter how much evidence I offer, it will not suffice. I could go on - but what's the point? If you hate someone, even good deeds by them seem nefarious. I like to think that I base my judgements and understanding on the best information currently available, and I've admitted numerous times that I was wrong when presented with better information because my interest is in the truth, and in using the truth to make things better.

Too few people share my view on this - and far too many are in love with their righteous indignation or their smug contentment.

Posted by Matt at February 3, 2004 10:16 AM

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