Mike posted a comment to my previous post, entitled "Exactly how stupid is our president?" The comment is pretty long, so I won't repost it in its entirety; rather, I'll address each section in turn.

I think building schools, hospitals, infrastructure, etc. is good news. Yes, when terrorists blow up our public works projects, that's bad news. And I'll concede that there's more bad news than good coming out of Iraq. But there is good news there.

Point taken. Yes, there may be some good news coming out of Iraq. But a majority of Iraqis (and especially those in Baghdad) don't feel that things are going so well and they actually wish Saddam Hussein were back in power. Why is this? Saddam's brutal repression didn't impact the average man-on-the-street very much. There was water, there was power. There weren't bombers blowing people up every day (and suicide bombers are now a daily occurrence in Iraq). Yes, Saddam was a dictator, and yes, dictators are always evil. But the Iraqis themselves don't necessarily feel that way. If his dictatorship touched them, it wasn't very much -- unless they were Kurds or dissidents (and, actually, "Iraqi Kurdistan," as it calls itself, is actually doing quite well; there are hardly any bombings up there, but then again, things were always better up there). Was did touch them was infastructure and the basic necessities of life. Saddam -- and to an even greater degree, the government -- kept that stuff running. Now that Saddam is out, there's no security, and you have situations where insurgents are destroying power lines and killing repair crews that come to repair the power lines. I submit that life for the average person in Iraq is getting worse. And people are fleeing Iraq to the tune of about 100,000 per month. Some countries, like Canada, have recognized that Iraq's situation is special and has granted refugee status to Iraqis. Again, there may be good things happening, but by and large, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the Iraqis are worse off than they were four years ago.

2. Believing things were better under Saddam is not the same as believing Saddam is good.

Of course not. Nevertheless, you say, "But I would not be pining for the good ol' days of totalitarianism, even if I did recognize that Saddam imparted a certain stability." The problem is that there are Iraqis "pining for the good ol' days of totalitarianism." And this is a problem for us, because one of our many reasons for going into Iraq was to "spread democracy." If democracy is so great, why don't the Iraqi people realize it? The answer is that democracy is great, but we severely botched our implementation of democracy in Iraq to the point that people would rather have the greater security and lesser freedom of Saddam than the lesser security and greater freedom of an Iraq without Saddam. This reflects poorly on our leaders' handling of the situation. Democracy should be good in and of itself, without explanation, but in this case, we created a half-assed democracy that has all the appearances of a democracy (elected leaders, independent branches of government) without the substance of one. The fact that Iraqis would rather live under a repressive Saddam than a free Nouri al-Maliki is a testament to how bad the situation there is.

3-4. This all could have been cleared up if Iraq had been more forthcoming with UN inspectors. The onus was on them.

Granted; Saddam could have been more forthcoming about the fact that he didn't have WMDs (most likely, he didn't want the U.N. wandering around and finding massive human rights abuses, instead). But President Bush also prematurely removed U.N. weapons inspectors from the country in 2003 before they had a chance to finish their inspections, and then he spun it to make it seem as though it was Saddam who had tossed the weapons inspectors out. When President Bush claimed that all diplomatic means had been exhausted, he was lying. All diplomatic means had not been exhausted; rather, Bush put an end to diplomacy in order to begin military action, the latter of which he had been intending to use all along regardless of whether Saddam complied with weapons inspectors (cf. The Downing Street Memo).

5. Your argument amounts to the old "but officer, I saw two other guys speeding too, and you didn't give them tickets" bit. No sale.

Yes, sale. Bush's arguments about why Saddam was more evil than other dictators in the world were unconvincing. He offered no hard evidence as to why we should go after Saddam rather than, say, North Korea or Saudi Arabia. This argument speaks more to our intentions than anything else. Was our intention to do away with an evil dictator? If so, then why didn't we go after the more evil dictators who really did have weapons of mass destruction? Answer: because our intentions had nothing to do with the altruistic notion of removing an evil dictator from power. That was a ruse and it only proves that we have been consistently lied to for four years. Why go after a dictator who -- evil though he may be -- is not a direct threat to us? I still regret not asking P.J. O'Rourke this question when he came to Miami. Here's what I would have asked him: "Sometime in 2003, all of America went to sleep, and Iraq was a distant threat. Sure, it was run by a dictator, but it was a nebulous, indirect, and not urgent threat to the United States. Then, the next day, suddenly Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and they had to be taken out now. Why did the administration's view on Iraq change so dramatically and so suddenly?" The bottom line: Saddam was not a threat to us. There were other nations that were threats to us. And yet we attacked the country that was not a threat to us. Why did this illogical situation occur?

6. Maybe I'm dense (it's a distinct possibility) but I don't remember anyone but Bush opponents giving out the "Iraq = al-Qaeda" line.

There's a great book out there called All the President's Spin which actually analyzes the ways in which the Bush administration went to great lengths to equate Iraq and al-Qaeda without explicitly saying the words. By casually mentioning Iraq and al-Qaeda together, coupled with the words "September the eleventh," Bush was able to create the impression that Iraq had something to do with September 11 while all the time retaining plausible deniability by not overtly saying the words. "What? Iraq was involved in September 11? I never said that!" And it's true that he never said the words, but he has excellent P.R. people working for him who know how to sell an idea without actually coming out and saying "Iraq = al-Qaeda = September 11." Advertising is all about subtlety. The American people were sold on this war as though it were blue jeans or Camel cigarettes. Sure, Camel doesn't come out and say that smoking is cool, but it's difficult to say that its advertising doesn't suggest that. In 2003, 40 percent of Americans thought that Iraq was responsible for September 11. Where could they have gotten that idea, especially since Iraq has never bombed us and al-Qaeda has bombed U.S. properties (embassies in Africa, the USS Cole) several times? Remember: You're a lot smarter than the average American, so just because you didn't fall for it doesn't mean that other people didn't.

"He never defines what the 'job' is, or what 'done' means ..."

Granted. Bush defines "job" every time he says it: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." But he repeats it so often that it has become less a policy argument than a catch-phrase.

He may not be the smartest man ever to occupy the post of president, I'll concede that; but an incurious and uncaring man, interested only in self, wouldn't start a pre-emptive foreign war justified, in his words, by dangers to the nation's long-term survival.

Here's the cynical part: I don't believe that President Bush does care about our nation's long-term survival. He may offer these reasons as justifications for his war, but they are all bromides. Bromides for what, I don't know; I've been spending four years wondering what his true reasons for the Iraq War are. A just war requires no convincing. Take our action in Afghanistan, with which I completely agreed. Al-Qaeda, supported by Afghanistan's Taliban government, attacked us. I believe we were completely justified in retaliating, and the rest of the world agreed. And if President Bush is so concerned about democracy, why did he "cut and run" in Afghanistan? He left that country "before the job [was] done" so that he could focus on Iraq. One of these was a war of necessity (if such a thing can exist); the other was a war of choice. Our retaliation against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was a natural step that any president -- yes, even Al Gore -- would have taken. The war in Iraq is one that was undertaken by President Bush of his own volition. And he took resources from Afghanistan -- where, by the way, there are still problems that remain unfixed -- to fight his pre-emptive war of choice in Iraq.

It was only after we went to war in Iraq that the goodwill we had generated after September 11 was gone. The bipartisan bickering was back, and the world was more resentful toward us than ever before. Recall what former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said: that, after the September 11 attacks, Bush and Rumsfeld ordered the CIA to find intelligence -- any intelligence, reliable or not, that might link Iraq to those attacks. Their reaction was not, "Let's find out who did this"; rather, it was, "Let's find out how we can blame Iraq for this." For me, this serves as a terrible bit of evidence indicating that Bush was itching for a war with Iraq from the start.

It's not that I disagree with the way the president has handled this war. It's that I disagree with the war itself; there is no "good" way to operate this war, since it shouldn't have happened to begin with. I believe that it was unjustified, illegal, and morally reprehensible. I find it further terrible that President Bush makes bold, idealistic justifications in public when there is substantial evidence to indicate that his real reasons are more cynical, sinister, and less motivated by the public welfare. (Recall that Bush wanted to goad Iraq into war by painting a U.S. spy plane in U.N. colors, encouraging them to fire on it. He must have been reading Lyndon Johnson's The Art of War.)

Thanks for your comments, Mike. I hope you find this response less hate-filled. Years of lies, swagger, immature smugness, and a disregard for reality have left me with a deep distaste for this president -- a distaste that I had only finally put to words in that previous post.