You are right about this, to a certain extent. But there is a serious danger to this -- from the standpoint of public morale and public support. If the statement "No WMDs found" is correct, then there are only two logical conclusions for us to reach: 1) they never existed in the first place, or 2) they have somehow been hidden from us. Item #1 would be an admission of rank incompetence or deliberate deception on the part of every person or organization that formally stated these WMDs existed, while Item #2 would be an admission on the part of the U.S. that the war has been an utter failure (i.e., if the purpose of the war was to eliminate another country's WMD capabilities and these capabilities remain intact outside our control, then we've botched the job).
IOW, you don't believe establishment of democracy is an effective method of dealing with aggressive nations.
No, I don't. And -- despite their occasional proclamations to the contrary -- neither does anyone in the Bush administration, or anyone else in Washington, for that matter.
98% of the American public has no clue who Richard Pearle is. Just because he is a Paleocon bete noire does not mean anyone else cares.
You're probably right about that, though the Bush administration clearly thought he was enough of a political liability and a colossal embarrassment that they felt a need to throw him out on his @ss before the start of the 2004 campaign.
IOW, the wogs can't understand what we enlightened people can. As if Japan had a history of respect for personal liberty, and we are delusional to think they could ever develop one.
Japan is a bad example to use in this context. Japan was so utterly devastated by the end of World War II that their government and political culture was going to become whatever the U.S. said it would be -- and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it. If Harry Truman thought it would be a good idea to name Ronald McDonald the emperor of Japan for life, then Ronald McDonald would be Japan's head of state to this day.
Turkey and India may not be "western" nations, but they have had extensive exposure to Western ideas over the centuries. India was a British colony until 50 years ago, for heaven's sake.
So violent pathological secular dictators who have sworn to destroy us are good, but violent pathological religious Muslims who have sworn to destroy us are bad? And we should therefore stop supporting the fighting of said violent pathological religious Muslims, and abandon an infant democracy to them?
I have no problem with supporting "infant democratic" movements in these places, if it's in our best interests to do this. But supporting these movements and invading a country are two completely different things. If a stable democratic government were truly feasible in Iraq, then the U.S. could have accomplished the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government and the establishment of a democratic government simply by supplying the people of Iraq with several million AK-47s and a couple of hundred million rounds of ammunition.
That is certainly the boilerplate spin put on the situation by the anti-war crowd, but, as usual, the spin is shallow and superficial to the facts it engages and the facts it glosses over.
Yes, ONE of the purposes of the war was to eliminate Saddam's control over WMDs. But there were myriad other valid casus belli, both pre and post 9/11. Among them were: 1) repeated cease fire violations; 2) financial support, asylum and training for terrorists; 3) known stockpiles of poison gas unaccounted for; 5) deliberate circumvention of inspections; 6) acquisition of technical means for nuclear development, biowar development and continued chemical development; 7) development of delivery systems for both conventional and WMDs; 8) continued pograms against non-baathist ethnic groups (Kurds and swamp Arabs); 9) reconstitution of military forces; 10) stockpiling of huge amounts of conventional weaponry.
Besides the actual casus belli, there were also myriad practical reasons for attacking Iraq. Among them were: 1) eliminating a cancer in the general ME; 2) establishing a strategic central position that puts the geographic keystone of the ME in friendly hands; 3) finished the job that was erroneously left undone in GW I; 4) eliminated the need for bases in Saudi Arabia, which was one of the prime recruiting points for Al Queda; 6) terrain favored rapid military advances, as opposed to mountainous Afghanistan or Iran; 7) native population was relatively secularized and non-homogeneous, with large pluralities already opposed to the Baathists; 8) we had extensive knowledge of the military terrain from GW I; 9) we believed our former coalition partners would support the effort.
It was this last reason that failed in the execution. The Iraq campaign was delayed far too long by France and co., which I believe to be directly responsible for the transfer and concealment of WMD assets. The 11th hour withdrawal of Turkey as a launching pad for the northern flank also allowed the escape of many of those former Baathists we are now fighting as one prong of the "insurgency".