Wolfowitz today provided new justifications for the war in Iraq:

I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you’re not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you’re going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country.

It’s a statement worth pondering, for we finally have a senior US administration official openly proposing a new doctrine to replace the old criteria for what constitutes a just cause for war. Previously, a just cause involved a retaliation in case of attack, or — more controversially — when the evidence of an impending attack was overwhelming — say, Hitler massing his armies on your border and handing you an ultimatum. Wolfowitz has now widened the definition of self defense to include acting on reasonable expectations of an attack. In other words, a preemptive attack can be a legitimate defense even if you are just reasonably sure you are in danger of being attacked.

But what qualifies as “reasonably sure”? Who gets to decide? And what if the information proves false, after the fact? Tony Blair in his speech to Congress answered that last point: It seems that this doctrine would apply only to failed states, where being wrong still means you are doing good merely by alleviating the yoke of a brutal dictatorship. You should only act when it’s a win-win situation, in other words. (I would like to hear Wolfowitz echo that sentiment.)

All this is fair enough, and I might even sign up if a definition for “reasonably sure” was drafted and the UN Security Council got the final say. In fact, such a process was set in motion, with Powell acting as prosecutor, if you will, but the “jury” of 15 nations indicated it would veto war for the time being — and the jury would have been right, after the fact.

It turns out that the jury was not convinced by the quality of the circumstancial evidence presented by the prosecution. The rest of the world was not reasonably sure Iraq was a threat to its neighbors or the US. And it was right, after the fact. Wolfowitz’s redefinition of a just cause for war is sound, but he and his neocon pals did not themselves take it to heart when they decided to act as judge, jury and executioner.

But here ends my lenient interpretation of Wolfowitz’s words. Just some reminders: Six months ago there was no murky intelligence. There was incontrovertible proof, to be shared with us after the fact. Instead, we now know that six months ago, the administration on at least one occasion made the case for war citing intelligence that it knew wasn’t murky at all, but clearly false. Leaving such misinformation in the State of the Union simply because it was plausibly attributable to the UK is not the behavior of an administration carefully weighing evidence as it ponders war as a last resort.

On a side note, is the Bush administration vindicated if it made up WMD evidence, embellished such evidence or inadvertently used false intelligence to go to war, but then, quite separately from the “intelligence” it had, it found WMDs? It may sound trite, but I think it is a fascinating philosophical question. Could you argue that the US had knowledge of WMDs in this case?

An analogy: I see a picture of Saddam Hussein writing with his left hand. I conclude he is left-handed. In fact, the picture I saw had been flipped using Photoshop — he was actually holding the pen in his right hand. However, he is left-handed, it just so happened that in the picture he was holding the pen in his right hand. Or this one: I tell everyone Matthew Rose cheats at Scrabble, not because I know he does but because I want to sully his reputation. Then it turns out he does cheat at Scrabble. Did I know that? Did I lie?

Christopher Hitchens has written a review of SAIS Professor Patrick McCarthy’s latest book, Language, Politics, and Writing: Stolentelling in Western Europe, and it is an embarrassment to the genre. It reads superficially as the verbal (and by now proverbial) skewering one expects of Hitchens, but in this particular case it is his critique, not the book, that ought to be shooed off the stage peremptorilyNot having read this particular book of McCarthy’s, I am not in a position to judge it; I can only judge Hitchens’s methodology in attempting to review it. On the basis of past exposure to McCarthy’s ideas and the typical clarity of his exposition, however, I would be very surprised to find this book not up to par..

Hitchens’s modus operandi, alas, is to elevate several grammatical misdemeanors by McCarthy — such as his use of “hopefully” instead of “it is to be hoped” — to the level of such offense that we are meant to mistrust the arguments they frame. It’s not quite an ad hominem attack, but it constitutes a logical fallacy nonetheless; let’s call it an ad eminem attack (in honor of someone truly grammatically challenged who nevertheless has something relevant to say). Elsewere, Hitchens attacks McCarthy’s spelling as a proxy for his ideas — we’ll call this an ad homonym attack.

But what is truly gratifying is to see Hitchens commit the very same types of errors for which he reproaches McCarthy. For example, he casts the first stone when he writes that

… it’s not undue nitpicking to notice the repeated misspelling of important names—Salman Rushdie, Jesse Owens, and Brian Friel—even though some of these must be blamed on cretinous copyediting.

In which case it is not undue nitpicking to notice Hitchens referring to Francois Mitterand, not Mitterrand, and Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes, instead of Les Temps Modernes. For such a short piece of writing, that’s a far worse batting average than McCarthy’s. If such errors are meant to be an indictment of the quality of one’s arguments, so be it. If they are not, Hitchens’s broadsides are pointless filler; a waste of my time, were I not having so much fun penning this riposte.

To see where such an approach to criticism can lead you, we can apply Hitchens’s stringent criteria for intelligibility to his own writing:

I was once as happy as anyone to sit with McCarthy and to discuss Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks or the ambiguities of Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes. I still enjoy these pursuits, though they occasionally strike me now as comparable to well-conducted tours of Atlantis. Perhaps that’s why the cultivated guides have such a marked tendency to gurgle, as they make their appointed rounds.

So which is it — is he or is he not happy to discuss Gramsci and Sartre? The defensive word “occasionally” must have been inserted in a moment of unease, as Hitchens would say. The last sentence of this passage hovers on the verge of gibberish — why on earth would a guide to Sartre and Gramsci gurgle? Actually, there is one way in which this sentence can make sense, but it would confirm that Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk. Lawyers: Clearly, when I say Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk, I am not implying that he is a drunk, merely that he has the emotional intelligence of one. Similarly, If I were to say that Hitchens has the sense of humor of a Mormon, I would not be implying that he is a Mormon.If you’ve met McCarthy, you’ll know he has a heavy speech impediment, the result of a motor neuron disease. Hitchens seems to find in this suitable material for a cheap joke. If I am wrong, then he is far more careless in his choice of words than we give him credit for. I wonder which fault Hitchens would rather own up to.

Actually, I don’t.

In fact, I am left wondering whether there isn’t something pathological to Hitchens’s motivations. He himself clearly thinks he acts out of an allegiance to honesty and intellectual rigor for which he will gladly sacrifice friendships. But in this review, he merely comes across as someone in desperate need to be cleverer than thou. This is not so easy with McCarthy, who is probably the cleverest man I’ve met. This must have rankled Hitchens.

The result is that Hitchens raises so many pointless quibbles, all so easily refuted, that the refutations themselves run the risk of boring you. Here are just a few:

Wouldn’t now — with Umberto Bossi in political alignment with Silvio Berlusconi — be the ideal moment to revisit Gramsci’s concept of Italy as two nations, southern and northern? McCarthy repeatedly passes up such cross-references, and one can’t but suspect that this is because they might interfere with a settled attitude.

No. The ideal moment to revisit Gramsci on such matters was in 1994, when Bossi and Berlusconi first entered into political alignment. And McCarthy covered it then. Trust me, I was there. Then there is this remarkable passage:

[W]hile discussing the divorce scandal that ruined the career of Charles Stuart Parnell, so stirred James Joyce, and so greatly retarded the cause of Irish nationalism, [McCarthy] calls it “arguably Ireland’s Dreyfus case.” This assertion is plainly ridiculous, as well as anachronistic. Parnell was dead before the Dreyfus case occurred and was never tried for anything himself. The only possible analogy is the lamentable fact that in both “cases” (in my opinion as well as that of McCarthy), the Roman Catholic hierarchy committed itself on the wrong side. The defensive word “arguably” must have been inserted in a moment of unease.

So he agrees with McCarthy, then; he just took a lot longer to reach the same conclusion, and had to think aloud to get there. Hitchens really needs to find himself an easier target; may I suggest some recent speeches by George Bush?

How do get from where we are now to the ideal global society?

But first, what is the ideal global society? For me, it’s a world government, perhaps a more muscular UN. It’s the principle of subsidiarity enacted along the US federal model, with countries democratically choosing almost all policies themselves, such as taxes and legal systems, but with the International Court of Justice as ultimate arbiter, enforcing such non-negotiable rights as freedom of speech, gender equality, freedom of religion… all the stuff we already take for granted in the west.

It’s completely free trade, free movement of labor and capital. It’s an aid and development program that is closer in size to 5% of global GDP than the current 1%. It’s a UN standing army, with a good track record of extinguishing hot spots, so that individual countries no longer feel the need to keep their own army. And it’s as many currency areas as are needed.

Now, how to get from here to there? Perhaps we should think of the EU and the US as good cop, bad cop. The idea would be that the EU holds the carrot, a shining example of democratic multilateralism at work, while the US holds the stick, engaging in the thankless task of dragging the stragglers kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The problem with this analogy, in addition to it being belabored, is that the bad cop is being very cavalier with the (international) law, bending it in order to save it, supposedly, while the good cop is selfishly keeping the carrot all to itself.

Or, at least, that is the impression the EU is in danger of giving. First off, anybody who has taken international trade theory knows that retaliatory tariffs hurt both sides. Even unilateral free trade regimes benefit both sides for slightly counterintuitive reasons that are most convincing with a little effort. Yet Europe is still in a mercantilist mood, where trade with the outsiders is a zero-sum game. This looks bad.

Second, CAP.

Third, it is nitpicking which countries to let in. It’s great that Poland is in. But Turkey should be next, and Israel, and why not Lebanon, and Palestine (now there is an incentive) and those countries ringing the Mediterranean? Giscard d’Estaing argues they are not Christian enough. That is such a silly argument it deserves no retort, but I couldn’t help myself. If Europe wanted to be a real good cop, it should allow in contiguous countries based purely on standards of democracy and human rights. Anything else is beneath contempt.

And yet, EU architects are queasy. Such an EU would be too big to govern effectively, they sayThe only reason I can think of why they might think a big EU is “too big to govern” is that they mean, “too big to govern by the current big countries in the EU.” That, however, is not a very democratic impulse.. Such an EU would have a diluted sense of identity, it would no longer be Europa Universalis. No it would not. But their concerns do raise the question of what the EU should be: the embryo of a future ideal global society? Or a fortress, defending our Christian heritage from the barbarians at the gate?

Obviously I much prefer the first option. The EU as an embryonic global society is also the reason why I don’t think political unions should dictate currency areas: as the EU grows, it would be economic suicide to get every new member to join EMU. Using the slippery slope argument here is a no-brainer: If a single currency is not enough for a growing EU, when do you add another, and on what basis? Obviously not out of political considerations; the answer, of course, is optimal currency areas. I, for one, think the eurozone has already expanded beyond its ideal size.

Others prefer the second option — Fortress Europe — and in many ways it is a lot simpler and more reassuring. One continent, one history, one nation, one currency… I unfortunately have a deep mistrust of nationalism, including the common European garden variety. Other might not. Well, then, if they must have a European club, at least make sure it is not at the expense of the rest of the world. At the very least, scrap CAP, trade barriers, and barriers to labor mobility for those outside the EU.

Is it still too early to assess the justifiability of the Iraq war? Can we at least draw some provisional conclusions? There’s been a respectful waiting period among Bush’s loyal opposition in Congress, chastened perhaps by the overwhelming popular support for this war in the US. But — amid the continued failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the right questions are beginning to be asked, not just by mainstream politicians, but by the mainstream media.

It would have been better if these institutions had raised these issues before the war, rather than after. For, while questions were being asked by some, they were not being asked by those who hold the most influence over public opinion in the US. Politicians, part herder and part herd, saw the cost of asking them rise too high once the snowballing war effort had reached a critical mass of popular support. The media, meanwhile, was stared down by an administration that was able to put its case in the starkest possible termsThere is media, and then there is Fox News, which started with the premise that the war is justified, and the truth be damned. That’s a text-book definition of propaganda.: “Iraq is dangerous to you. We can tell. Don’t you trust us?” Most Americans answered “yes, we trust you,” because the implications of not being able to trust the government on this matter were unpalatable to them. I certainly was willing to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt when he convincingly brought the administration’s case to the Security Council.

The pact became: The US government has incontrovertible but classified proof of ongoing biological and chemical weapons programsLet’s just not mention the forgeries that sustained the claims of a nuclear weapons program. and will furnish us retroactively with the evidence, as soon as it is able to secure the ground for inspectors. For the record, then, the pertinent questions now are: Was this case for war with Iraq overstated? If so, by whom — the CIA? Or the White House? Through incompetence, or by designYou can expect a parallel debate in the UK.?

And a bonus question we will have fun with in the blogosphere — those bloggers who claimed all the credit and influence for goading a country to war, will they also clamor for a share of the blame if there is blame due? Yes Andrew Sullivan, I am thinking of you. You were among the first and most vociferous in favor of bringing war to Iraq, and now you are setting the stage for claiming you were duped. On May 16, 2003, you wrote:

How to explain the lack of WMDs in Iraq? Were we lied to? Is our intelligence flawed? Were the weapons destroyed? […] [T]he bottom line of Lacey’s argument is that our intelligence caused Bush and Blair to commit extraordinary errors in front of the entire world. Where is the accountability for that?

But surely there is a special accountability for those who did the persuading, as opposed to those who were merely persuaded? From the very beginning, you pounced on each and every hint that the State Department might be wavering in its commitment to war. You pushed every story that maximized Iraq’s danger to others, and ridiculed those stories that minimized the danger. Media outlets that did question the justness of this war, like the BBC, you demonized. That is not a sophist being duped. That is an ideologue being biased.

Several commentators have pointed out that we can already conclude there was an overstated case for war. There simply were no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (NBCs) primed for use in battle, nor large-scale ongoing NBC weapons programs, as promised by the US — these would have been impossible to miss. The question becomes: by how much was the case overstated? To answer that definitively, we will need several more months. But day after day it becomes more plausible that Saddam Hussein never restarted prohibited weapons production after the inspectors left in 1998, and that the NBCs he possessed from previous forays in the 80s degraded rapidly, as apparently these weapons do.

So far, the questions asked (by the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan, Democrat politicians and others) have hinted that the mistakes occurred at the intelligence gathering stage. But an extremely interesting piece by the well-sourced Josh Marshall in his Talking Points Memo now lays the blame at the door of the White House. Nut graf:

The story, again and again over the last eighteen months, has been of the intelligence bureaucracy generating estimates of Iraq’s capacities that are pretty much in line with what we’re now finding. Again and again, though, the political leaders sent them back to come up with better answers.

Combine this with the stunning (to me) ABC News report a month ago of a Bush administration source “leaking” that accusations involving Iraq and WMDs were a mere pretext for war, and you can make the case that the decision to go to war was not made reluctantly, from a critical appraisal of available intelligence, but out of ideological conviction that necessitated some shoehorning of reality.

What do I now think happened? Wolfowitz and his neocon pals had a window of opportunity after 9/11 to sell their pre-existing action plan to the White House. Their idea: to rid the world of threats to US interests through unilateral, pre-emptive wars, starting with Iraq. There were competing strategiesPowell favored multilateral action; others favored containment coupled to policies to alleviate the root causes of international terrorism, but the neocons won out through a concerted campaign that played to a president who by his own admittance doesn’t have the first clue about international affairs, and hence who is unable to appreciate such subtleties as just war theory“The principles of the justice of war are commonly held to be: having just cause, being declared by a proper authority, possessing right intention, having a reasonable chance of success, and the end being proportional to the means used.”.

Whereas most objections to the US-led war have revolved around there being a lack of right intention on the part of the US (the war is about oil, about lashing back, about Jewish world domination, about imperialism), we have here a better criticism of the war, one that does not require a global conspiracy; the US may even have had the right intent in wanting to get rid of Saddam HusseinThomas Aquinas on right intention: “True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”, but lacked a sufficiently just cause. Whether through wishful thinking or deliberate intent, a just cause was fabricated through exaggeration and paranoid induction from relatively inane intelligence information.

Because the question of evidence was always going to be a hurdle to cross after the flush of victory, I tend towards an explanation of this process that involves disastrous delegation: A president out of his depth buys the neocon agenda, makes his wishes known, and yes-men scramble to provide rationales. These in turn get re-appropriated by the President, who now utters them as truths. This process has happened at least once, when Bush accused Iraq of being in the final stages of manufacturing nuclear weapons, citing documents the White House now acknowledges were forgeries.

If this is what happened, and Iraq is found empty of NBCs, many people in the intelligence community and at the State Department will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to fall on their swords to protect the President from charges of gross incompetence. Don’t count on it.