Blog Archive

Mark Shea has a very interesting post on the connection between the SCOTUS Lawrence decision and the war in Iraq. It is a complicated argument to reproduce but basically Mark says that Lawrence ignored the dangerous constitutional precedent it was setting in order to attempt a good. He then connects this same mindset with pro-war conservatives:

Now, what bothers me is that it seems to me increasingly that pro-war conservatives embrace, when it comes to the war, what they repudiate when it comes to Lawrence. Yeah, okay. The threat of WMDs was exaggerated, but still, it’s great that Saddam is gone. Yeah, okay. The “prison” was an orphanage. But ya gotta admit that the greater good was done. Okay, maybe it was, well, inoperative, when Cheney declared emphatically, “Simply stated there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” But does anybody really miss Saddam? I mean, come on!
All this seems to me to be an ex post facto way of saying, “Sometimes cutting down the laws (or the truth) to get at the devil is A OK.” The longer we look for weapons, and the more excuses or “Well, it wasn’t really about WMDs, you know” I hear, the more I begin to feel had and to think the Holy Father had a point. Telling me Saddam was a devil is not going to convince me that we therefore had the right to cut down all the laws in England to get at him. I want to know that we really had cause. Which means I want to know that there was the imminent threat of WMDs we were assured of. Otherwise, at the end of the day, I don’t see a big difference between Roper, Lawrence and Gulf War II.

No offence Mark but what the? First of all “the law” and rhetorical arguments for war are not similar concepts. As Mark notes the whole meaning behind the quote from the Man for All Seasons is that the law is there to protect you so if you abandon it to go after the devil it won’t be there when you need it. But conservatives aren’t saying that Bush lied and manipulated the truth for his own purposes. He didn’t break down the law or truth to get the devil. For Pete’s sake we had months of debate about the war including a Congressional debate and vote and then more debate about that vote. Through in a few dozen UN resolutions and we are not taking about an argument focused on one rationale nor one that brushed aside the truth. Bush’s information might have been faulty and the administration might have emphasized the most popular argument for going to war even though the evidence was weak but he did not sweep aside the law or the truth.

Mark Shea and a host of others want to retro-actively insist that the administration based the entire case for war with Iraq on an imminent threat of WMD attack directly on America. This is hog wash. The debate was much broader than that and everyone in the blogosphere should know that. Clearly, the administration thought Saddam had WMDs and in a state much closer to weapons grade than appears likely given what we have found so far. What Mar and the others seem intent on leaving out is that the point Bush was making was not the fact that an attack was imminent but rather the level of risk now involved. Given Saddam’s history, given his recent actions, given what experts and inspectors had found despite every type of hindrance, given the fact of 9/11, and given the fact that European and World support for containing Saddam always faded without constant US pressure; given all of this Bush simply stated that the risk was too great. This was a judgement call. The fact on the ground may (we still don’t know) indicate that Saddam was bluffing or scheming or something in such a way that our intelligence was wrong and led to bad conclusions. But again, this does not mean that Bush’s argument was deceptive or wrong. On top of all that

It is beyond me how one can describe a wide ranging, long lasting, and intricate diplomatic initiative accompanied by a healthy democratic debate including a vote in Congress as a casting aside of the law simply because Iraq didn’t have a nuke pointed at New York.