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Paul Wolfowitz

Promoted to President of the World Bank, March 2005

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was an example of key planners of the invasion and occupation of Iraq who have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence.

Questions following a Policy address to the Council for Foreign Relations in New York City (January 23, 2003)

Question:

I think, Mr. Wolfowitz, your answer amounts to: "We can't tell you what we have of information, but trust us. It's there." Now, isn't the fundamental principle of a democratic free nation precisely not to trust government? Why should Americans trust their government? We've heard that before in Vietnam, we've heard it many times: "Trust us," and it turned out to be untrustworthy.

I don't see how this administration thinks it can build a policy for war, preventive war, that would be accepted by our allies and by American citizens on the basis of "We've got the info; we can't tell you how we got it or where we got it; we got it, trust us." And isn't that a foolish and ultimately self-destructive way for this administration to proceed?

Wolfowitz:

In some cases, we can tell very clearly where we got information from. In some cases, you would put somebody's life at risk if you told how you got it. That's a fact of life; it's not something you can overcome.

I must say I sort of find it astonishing that the issue is whether you can trust the U.S. government. The real issue is, can you trust Saddam Hussein? And it seems to me the record is absolutely clear that you can't. And we're going to have to have some very powerful evidence that he has changed and that we can trust him, because otherwise, we are trusting our security in the hands of a man who makes ricin, who makes anthrax, who makes botulism toxin, who makes aflatoxin, and who has no compunctions whatsoever about consorting with terrorists. Who do you want to trust?

Question (Kathleen McCarthy, the Graduate Center, City University of New York):

My question is this: Why is it a much more important immediate short-term goal to disarm Iraq than North Korea, when we know that North Korea also has a very sophisticated arsenal and ties to terrorist groups. Why is supporting and promoting freedom in Iraq more important than promoting freedom in North Korea, when we also know that the administration there is very cruel as well?

Wolfowitz:

It's a reasonable question and I hear it a lot . . . . These are different cases, different countries. The North Korean people suffer as much, maybe worse, if it's possible. They're the only candidates in the world for suffering worse than the Iraqi people.

But again, it is a different case. We have different partners, different countries to work with. We have got to have a strategy that doesn't just do one problem at a time, take the most important one and wait for everything else. We're trying, in a reasonable way, to focus now where we have the world's entire attention focused, to clean up something that's 12 years old.

Wolfowitz, on Feb. 19, 2003:

We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq. There's not going to be the hostility that you described Saturday. There simply won't be.

Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Budget Committee prior to the Iraq war, Feb. 27, 2003:

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.

House subcommittee on Iraq testimony (February 28, 2003):

I can't imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years.

27-March-03:

We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in May 2003 that the members of Bush's war cabinet couldn't make up their minds on the reasons for the invasion of Iraq:

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One was weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.

Wolfowitz, later embarrassed by the publication of this quote, claimed Vanity Fair misconstrued his remarks; but this quote comes from a transcript that was posted on the Department of Defense web site.

Paul Wolfowitz June 4, 2003:

Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.

Roger Hedgecock Show (February 6, 2004):

This word imminent keeps coming up. The President never said that there was an imminent threat. . . . . Look, intelligence is an uncertain business. As I said a few minutes ago, you don't have the luxury before the fact of basing your decisions on what you may learn later. . . . . I mean stop and think about that hole in which we found Saddam Hussein hiding. He hid in a hole like that for nine months. That's a big enough hole to contain enormous lethal quantities of anthrax or other biological weapons. There could be such stashes still in Iraq. . . . .

(World Bank Days) March 17, 2005):

....the importance of leadership and what it consists of: not lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so.

Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg, who needs no introduction from those who quench their thirst from swill of the National Review, proposed this bet with Juan Cole (Informed Comment) on 5-Feb-02:

Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it.

David Petraeus

Petraeus wrote more as a cheerleader than as a reporter in the Washington Post: Battling for Iraq (Sunday, September 26, 2004):

18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up.

...The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq.

....there are reasons for optimism. Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of which about 100,000 are trained and equipped) and an additional 74,000 facility protection forces are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being reestablished.

Most important, Iraqi security forces are in the fight. . . .

Six battalions of the Iraqi regular army and the Iraqi Intervention Force are now conducting operations. Two of these battalions, along with the Iraqi commando battalion, the counterterrorist force, two Iraqi National Guard battalions and thousands of policemen recently contributed to successful operations. . . .

Iraqi National Guard battalions have also been active in recent months. Some 40 of the 45 existing battalions -- generally all except those in the Fallujah-Ramadi area -- are conducting operations on a daily basis, most alongside coalition forces, but many independently. Progress has also been made in police training. In the past week alone, some 1,100 graduated from the basic policing course and five specialty courses. By early spring, nine academies in Iraq and one in Jordan will be graduating a total of 5,000 police each month from the eight-week course, which stresses patrolling and investigative skills, substantive and procedural legal knowledge, and proper use of force and weaponry, as well as pride in the profession and adherence to the police code of conduct.

. . . . despite the sensational attacks, there is no shortage of qualified recruits volunteering to join Iraqi security forces. In the past couple of months, more than 7,500 Iraqi men have signed up for the army and are preparing to report for basic training to fill out the final nine battalions of the Iraqi regular army. Some 3,500 new police recruits just reported for training in various locations. . . .

That was in 2004. . .

George Tenet

Winner, Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As CIA Director, Tenet was responsible for gathering information on Iraq and the potential threat posted by Saddam Hussein. According to author Bob Woodward, Tenet told President Bush before the war that there was a “slam dunk case” that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Tenet remained publicly silent while the Bush administration made pre-war statements on Iraq’s supposed nuclear program and ties to al Qaeda that were contrary to the CIA’s judgments. Tenet issued a statement in July 2003, drafted by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, taking responsibility for Bush’s false statements in his State of the Union address. Tenet voluntarily resigned from the administration on June 3, 2004. He was later awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

CNN, (19 April-04):

It’s a slam dunk case.

Richard Perle

Richard Perle, A.K.A., “Prince of Darkness,” was the chairman of Defense Policy Board during the run-up to the Iraq war. He suggested Iraq had a hand in 9-11. In 1996, he authored “Clean Break,” a paper that was co-signed by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others that argued for regime change in Iraq. Shortly after the war began, Perle resigned from the Board because he came under fire for having relationships with businesses that stood to profit from the war. Currently, Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he specializes in national security and defense issues. He has been investigated for ethical violations concerning war profiteering and other conflicts of interest.

In the New Statesman on December 16th, 2002 John Pilger, one of the most respected journalists in Britain, captured Perle's prophecy of Bush's grand idea:

This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just Let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

In February 2003 when Operation Iraqi Freedom was less than a month away, he told David Rose,

Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform. It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding.

Six months later, after Bush's 'mission' was 'accomplished', at in his address at the AEI Luncheon Keynote (Monday, September 22, 2003):

And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.

Three years later, in October 2006, under the shadows of a looming Democratic election victory, Perle experienced bitter aftertaste in talking with David Rose:

The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity . . .

I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

. . . Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.

Stephen Hadley

Promoted to National Security Advisor, January 26, 2005

As then-Deputy National Security Advisor, Hadley disregarded memos from the CIA and a personal phone call from Director George Tenet warning that references to Iraq’s pursuit of uranium be dropped from Bush’s speeches. The false information ended up in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

Press Briefing on Iraq WMD and SOTU Speech, 22-July-03:

I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue. … And it is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility in connection with the inclusion of these 16 words in the speech that he gave on the 28th of January.

Tom Friedman

On the Charlie Rose (for a whole hour) 30-May-2003:

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.

...We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.

...What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Andrew Natsios

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Natsios, then the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, went on Nightline and claimed that the U.S. contribution to the rebuilding of Iraq would be just $1.7 billion. When it became quickly apparent that Natsios’ prediction would fall woefully short of reality, the government came under fire for scrubbing his comments from the USAID Web site. Natsios stepped down as the head of USAID in January and is currently teaching.

Nightline, (23-Apr-03):

The American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this. Any more are . . . outlandish figures I’ve seen, I have to say, there’s a little bit of hoopla involved in this.

Eric Alterman

Eric Alterman in the April 21, 2003, issue of the Nation:

Is Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the Iraqis would welcome us as 'their hoped-for liberators'?

Edward Said

Edward Said in the April 17, 2003, London Review of Books:

Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad and Nasiriya...and they have presented a much more detailed, more realistic account of what has befallen Baghdad and Basra, as well as showing the resistance and anger of the Iraqi population, dismissed by Western propaganda as a sullen bunch waiting to throw flowers at Clint Eastwood lookalikes. . . . The idea that Iraq's population would have welcomed American forces entering the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment was always utterly implausible.

Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough has been the host of MSNBC's Morning Joe since July, 2007. He had publicly supported George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Previously, Scarborough captured the élan of those heady days so long ago when the Iraq war smelled like victory to the mightiest minds of our political discourse. On April 10, 2003, the day after the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, Scarborough remarked:

I'm waiting to hear the words, 'I was wrong,' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types. . . . Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Tom Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing.

Michael O'Hanlon

Michael O'Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Letter Signatory for the Project for the New American Century, Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations and a Former Analyst for the Institute for Defense Analysis. Although frequently posing as a critic of the War in Iraq, O'Hanlon has been among its most promient rosy-eyed cheerleaders. On April 9, 2003, in an essay Hanlon wrote:

Three weeks into the war, with the conflict's outcome increasingly clear, it is a good time to ask if General Myers was right. Will war colleges around the world be teaching the basic coalition strategy to their students decades from now, or will the conflict be seen as a case in which overwhelming military capability prevailed over a mediocre army from a mid-sized developing country?

Six months after the invasion (September 2003) O'Hanlon wrote:

How can we really determine if the Iraq mission is going well? . . . To convince a skeptical public about progress in Iraq, the Bush administration would do well to provide more systematic information on all of these and other measurable metrics routinely -- even when certain trends do not support the story it wants to sell.

The administration should want to do this, because on balance the Iraq mission is going fairly well . . . But most indicators are now favorable in Iraq . . . . Around Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, and other parts of the northern "Sunni triangle," for example, former regime loyalists have been sufficiently weakened that they need reinforcements from other parts of Iraq to continue many of their efforts. Most Baathists from the famous "deck of cards" are now off the street; many second tier loyalists of the former regime are also being arrested or killed on a daily basis. . . . In these counterinsurgency operations, American troops are following much better practices than they did in Vietnam . . . . Coalition forces and other parties were slow at times to anticipate such tactics, resulting in excessive vulnerability to the kinds of truck bombings witnessed in August and the kinds of assassination attempts that just took the life of a member of the Governing Council, Akila al-Hashimi. But these mistakes are being corrected, and future such attacks are unlikely to be as devastating.

And at Brookings, 9/30/03]:

But the Iraqis we met were nonetheless grateful for the defeat of Saddam and passionate about their country’s future. Their enthusiasm, and their desire to work together with U.S. and other coalition forces, warmed the heart of this former Peace Corps volunteer. Maybe that is why, on balance, I couldn’t help but leave the country with a real, if guarded and cautious, feeling of optimism.

O'Hanlon testified in the House Armed Services Committee in October of 2003,

In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding. By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage. While one would be mistaken to assume rapid or easy victory, Mr. Rumsfeld's leaked memo last week probably had it about right when he described the war as a "long, hard slog" that we are nonetheless quite likely to win. . . . That said, on the prognosis of Iraq's future, the Bush administration is at least partly and perhaps even mostly right. Negative headlines need to be quickly countered with good news, of which there is an abundance. . . Most of Iraq is now generally stable . . . Things are getting gradually better even as we progress towards an exit strategy that could further diffuse extremist sentiment.

One year after Bush's invasion, O'Hanlon on March 19, 2004:

At that pace, one might think the war should be won by summer. . . .Overall, the glass in Iraq is probably about three-fifths full. Considering the growing strength of Iraqi security services and the fact that $18 billion in American money (as well as a few billion more from other foreign donors) is beginning to flow into Iraq, it is likely to get somewhat fuller soon.

Even as O'Hanlon began expressing increasing concerns about instability in Iraq, it was almost always tempered with rosy overall assessments of the occupation, such as this, from May 16, 2004:

While the overall situation is disconcerting, there is still hope -- especially if the standard for success is defined realistically as an absence of civil war, a gradually improving economy, and slowly declining rates of political and criminal violence. The scheduled transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi caretaker government on June 30 may at least begin to defuse the growing anti-American anger that is helping fuel the insurgency. And most American assistance, tied up in bureaucratic red tape until now, should begin to jump-start Iraq's economy in the coming months, with a likely beneficial effect on security as well.

Fast forward to 2007: in a July 30, 2007 op-ed piece in the New York Times O'Hanlon and co-author Kenneth M. Pollack, just back from eight days in Iraq, found progress being made.

As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Source

James K. Galbraith

James K. Galbraith on the American Prospect website, April 1, 2003:

If history is a guide, you cannot subdue a large and hostile city except by destroying it completely. Short of massacre, we will not inherit a pacified Iraq. . . . To support 'the groundwork' for this effort is to support a holocaust, quite soon, against Iraqi civilians and also against the troops on both sides. That is what victory means.

"Old Europe"

Der Spiegel, March 31, 2003:

Gruesome days for the German foreign minister: Every morning at nine, [Joschka Fischer's] staff briefs him on the situation in Iraq in the ministry's underground situation room. His worst fears are coming true: The U.S. military appears to be stuck in its tracks in the desert, and civilian casualties are multiplying. It has never been so painful to have been in the right, murmurs the foreign minister, with a worried look on his face. . . .

President Chirac accuses the Americans of having made both a strategic and a political mistake:

They thought they would be greeted as liberators and that the regime would collapse like a house of cards. But they underestimated Iraqi patriotism. They would have been better off listening to us.

Peter Arnett

Peter Arnett on Iraqi state television, March 30, 2003:

The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. . . . Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I've been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration.

James Webb

James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003, You've got your war novelist, phoning it in from his experiences in Vietnam, 30 years ago:

Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to get any better for a while.

At the time of this posting, of course, it's Senator-Elect Webb.

R.W. Apple Jr

New York Times "news analyst" R.W. Apple Jr., March 30, 2003:

With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made . . . gross military misjudgments. . . . The very term 'shock and awe' has a swagger to it, no doubt because it was intended to discourage Mr. Hussein and his circle. But it rings hollow now.

Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter, on a South African radio station, March 25, 2003:

The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated....We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. . . . [W]e will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

On 23 March 2003, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. asked his fellow Americans to wake up and smell the coffee. He published in the Los Angeles Times, Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy:

We are at war again -- not because of enemy attack, as in World War II, nor because of incremental drift, as in the Vietnam War -- but because of the deliberate and premeditated choice of our own government.

Now that we are embarked on this misadventure, let us hope that our intervention will be swift and decisive, and that victory will come with minimal American, British and civilian Iraqi casualties.

But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.

The Bush Doctrine converts us into the world's judge, jury and executioner -- a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership. As John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821, the fundamental maxims of our policy "would insensibly change from liberty to force ... [America] might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit." Already the collateral damage to our civil liberties and constitutional rights, carried out by the religious fanatic who is our attorney general, is considerable -- and more is still to come.

What drove the rush to war? Hussein has a significantly smaller military force than he had in 1990, and he has grown weaker as more weapons have been exposed and destroyed under the United Nations' inspection regime. The cause of our rush to war was so trivial as to seem idiotic. It was the weather. American troops, our masters tell us, will lose their edge in the Persian Gulf's midday sun; so we had to go to war before summer. This is a reason to rush to war? We have, after all, a professional army -- and a professional army ought not to lose its edge so quickly and easily.

There is a base suspicion that we are going to war against Iraq because that is the only war we can win. We can't win the war against Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda strikes from the shadows and disappears into them. We can't win a war against North Korea because it has nuclear weapons. Indeed, the danger from North Korea is far more clear, present and compelling than the danger from Iraq, and our different treatment of the two countries is a potent incentive for other rogue states to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists?

I think the media are greatly to blame. There have been congressional efforts to jump-start a debate. Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have delivered strong and thoughtful speeches opposing the rush to war. They have been largely ignored by the media. Some philanthropist had to pay the New York Times to print the text of Byrd's powerful Feb. 12 speech in a full-page advertisement -- a speech ignored by the media when delivered. The media have played up mass demonstrations at the expense of the reasoned case against the war.

According to polls, a near majority of ill-informed Americans believes Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and resulting massacre of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Hussein is a great villain, but he had nothing to do with 9/11. Many, perhaps most, Americans believe a war against Iraq will be a blow against international terrorism. But evidence from the region indicates very plainly that it will make recruitment much easier for Al Qaeda and other murderous gangs.

What should we have done? What if opposition to war had received a fair break from the media? There are two strong arguments for the war -- that Hussein might down the road acquire nuclear weapons, and that the people of Iraq deserve liberation from his monstrous tyranny.

Unlike biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms -- and their production facilities -- are hard to conceal. Inspection, surveillance, tapping telephone calls and espionage could check any nuclear initiative on Hussein's part. He is containable, and he is not immortal.

The more powerful argument is humanitarian intervention. This comes with ill grace from an administration that includes people who showed no objections to Hussein's human rights atrocities when he was at war with Iran. But do we have a moral obligation to fight despicable tyrants everywhere?

Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."