The Wall Street Journal published a particularly nauseating opinion piece yesterday — so nauseating, in fact, that I felt compelled to talk about it. It's called "Why We Went to Iraq," and it is authored by Fouad Ajami, someone who bills himself as a foreign policy expert.

Ajami's complaint begins with Scott McClellan, who last week suggested that the Iraq War was one of choice, not necessity. Ajami argues:

The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power.

While lamenting the way that war critics have "launched a new attack on the origins of the war," Ajami simultaneously creates a brand-new justification for the Iraq War. Previous justifications provided by the Bush administration for invading Iraq included:

• Saddam Hussein provided material support to al-Qaeda
• Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa
• Saddam Hussein was developing biological and chemical weapons
• Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons
• Saddam Hussein was in violation of U.N. Resolution 1441
• Saddam Hussein is trying to take over the Middle East
• Saddam Hussein threw the weapons inspectors out before they had finished their job

Points one, two, four, six, and seven have been debunked outright. Saddam stopped his nuclear program exactly when we thought he did: after the Persian Gulf War. Saddam never had any desire to take over the Middle East; he was perfectly content to run his ego-centric dictatorship. What most Republican students of foreign policy don't understand is that not all dictators are the same. Different dictators have different reasons for ruling. Some, like Saddam, or Turkmenbashi the Great, want to have their own personality cult. Others, like Adolf Hitler, wanted to take over the world. It is for the reason above that Saddam did not cooperate with al-Qaeda: Saddam's was a crazy secular dictatorship; al-Qaeda wished to impose a crazy theocratic dictatorship on the Middle East, which would have been a threat to Saddam's power; thus, the enemy of Saddam's enemy was not his friend simply because they had a shared enemy. It's not as simple as that.

Bush claimed, per point seven, that Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out before their job was done. It was actually President Bush who told the U.N. weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, and then claimed it was Saddam who had thrown them out, providing another wonderful pretense for war. Bush, the brilliant conflict resolver, felt that the time for diplomacy had ended.

With regard to point three, Saddam did use chemical weapons — but they were chemical weapons the United States gave him back when we were best buddies in the 1980s. (Here's a picture of Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Reagan Administration special envoy Donald Rumsfeld in 1983.)

As for U.N. Resolution 1441, Iraq was in violation of that, but so were some ninety other countries.

Now, back to the op-ed. In three sentences, Ajami syntatically links "9/11" and "Saddam Hussein" the same way the Bush administration did in 2002. First, he invokes "9/11" and the "gathering dangers" thereafter. 9/11 provides the rationale for the War on Terr'. It was not enough, says Ajami, to go after the people that attacked us; we then needed to go after the Arabs that didn't attack us! What a brilliant military strategy: attack people who haven't attacked us! Let the Canadian, Australian, and Azerbaijanian Wars begin!

Okay, okay, so the real policy at work here is preemptive warfare, and in the history of war, it hardly ever goes well. Saddam Hussein is a metonymy for "Arab radicalism," therefore he must be attacked. Why him specifically? Ajami isn't quite clear on this; he suggests that Saddam "had drawn the short straw," leading one to believe that we picked Saddam at random after blindfolding Paul Wolfowitz, spinning him in a circle, and then giving him a thumbtack to place on a giant world map. Too bad he didn't stick the tack into Micronesia; that mission against someone who never attacked us would have been accomplished much faster!

There's one problem with the idea that Saddam Hussein represents "Arab radicalism." This problem is that he doesn't. Conservative theologians have struggled for six years to come up with a word to describe the kinds of people who want to attack us. Because these conservatives want democracy to be rammed into the Middle East like a battering ram, their requirements for a word to describe the people who attack us must relate to the Middle East; if we used the word "terrorist," we'd have to invade the Basque country of Spain. Ajami uses the phrase "Arab radicalism," which sounds great, but doesn't describe very much. Iranians, for example, aren't ethnically Arab, but their government still doesn't like us very much. Also, what qualifies an Arab as radical? Saddam Hussein is a crazy dictator like any other crazy dictator. It just so happens that he's in the Middle East and sits on a honking pile of oil.

And what about the ethnic Arabs who aren't Muslim? Another important &em and implicit — requirement of a definition of "terrorist" is that it must refer to Muslims. Enter the phrases "Islamofascist" and "Islamist," the latter of which Ajami uses in his op-ed. "Islamofascist" has very little meaning; it's a P.R. term designed to conflate Islam and fascism, the latter of which Americans know (or think they know) a lot about. "I may not know what an Islamofascist is, but I know what a fascist is! It stands to reason that they're the same thing! Let's kill them!"

The word "Islamist" similarly has no meaning and is actually insulting to Muslims. What is an Islamist? Someone who believes in Islam? Does it follow, therefore, that people who believe in Islam are terrorists? Would we have called Timothy McVeigh a "Christianist"? Using Ajami's logic, we should, since McVeigh's attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 was terrorism based in his "radical" Christian faith.

Ajami suggests that the United States' policy of preemptive warfare has frightened enough Arab states into combatting terrorism in the Middle East: "If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq." Ajami has here created a conditional statement: "If X conditions are met, then Y results follow." The counterfactual of a conditional statement is a defense against that statement: "If X conditions were not met, then Y results did not follow." Ajami's statement is, "If Islamism is on the ropes [and] if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, [then] no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq."

The question is: are Arab states showing greater resolve in fighting terrorism? Well, we have Iraq, which is currently engaged in its own in-fighting, notably Muqtada al-Sadr against the rest of the government. In Iran, we have Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, who materially supports Shi'a fighters in Iraq. We have Lebanon, which elected members of the terrorist group Hezbollah to the Lebanese Parliament in 2005. We have Saudi Arabia, which, as far as we know, still supports terrorism. In July, 2006, Lebanon and Israel got involved in a war in which Hezbollah scored a moral victory merely by surviving the onslaught of the Israeli military. We have ignored Afghanistan since 2002, and as a result, the Taliban as just as powerful there as they ever were. So — has "this American project in Iraq" put "Islamism on the ropes"? Certainly not. If anything, it has reduced America's diplomatic credentials abroad. America is now not the country of reasoned talks and brokering, but the country of swaggering, militant ignorance that shoots first and asks questions later. Thanks, Iraq War.

Even in numerical terms — in which Ajami claims that terrorists have been "bloodied in Iraq" — reports from the CIA, NSA, and Department of State show that terrorist activities have increased since the start of the Iraq War. Terrorists don't seem to be particularly intimidated by a country whose military is stretched paper-thin in a country in which it doesn't seem likely it will ever leave gracefully.

Ajami also takes a new tack on the WMD argument: "The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith." So we were wrong, but we meant well. The road to Hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Also, there is plenty of indication that the claims about WMDs were made in bad faith, with the administration picking intelligence that it liked and ignored the intelligence it didn't, regardless of how correct this intelligence was.

He then proceeds to say, Hey, so what if we kept on changing our rationale for the war as each rationale was successively proven wrong or misguided? "The aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances." He cites the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's focus on slavery as an example of how a war against secession became a war against slavery.

Except that it didn't. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to piss off the Confederacy. Personally, Lincoln had no problem with slavery and he would just as soon have avoided discussion of The Peculiar Institution altogether.

Ajami closes by suggesting that our war in Iraq spared "people of threats and dangers." But it is extremely disingenuous to suggest that our Iraq War policy has preventing more domestic terrorism. There is no evidence to suggest that anything we did or did not do in the War on Terr' has prevented another terrorist attack. Using Ajami's logic, it could have been appointing John Roberts to the Supreme Court that has prevented another terrorist attack. It could have been Ruben Studdard winning American Idol that has prevented another terrorist attack. That we invaded Iraq — a country that hadn't threatened to attack us — has made us safer somehow is a dubious assumption that has little factual support.

But who needs facts? Ajami doesn't! "Five months from now, the American public will vote on this war, in the most dramatic and definitive of ways. There will be people who heed Ambassador Crocker's admonition. And there will be others keen on retelling how we made our way to Iraq." Ajami is blissfully ignorant of the extreme irony that he himself is one of those people desperately retelling how we made our way to Iraq, hoping beyond hope that people's memories are as transient as he thinks they are for them to believe newer, more made-up stories about why we got into Iraq in the first place.