Damn, he always does this. I'm working myself up to a weblog post, and Thomas Friedman comes along and says what I meant to. The NYT columnist, commenting on the failure to produce Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, says that direct danger to the West was only the stated justification. The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world.
   First, let me say: told you so. And I'm guessing that, behind closed doors, the neocons are making much the same point. Paul Wolfowitz, according to a Vanity Fair interview which he is disputing, said that the WMD argument took prominence because it was the one casus belli that all could agree to.
   Colin Powell is putting as much distance between the State Department and the embarrassing failure to discover chemical or biological weapons. Where do you think his behind-the-scenes reaction to the intelligence reports -- "This is bullshit" -- came from.
   But the fact of the matter, awkward to those of us naturally predisposed to Colin Powell and Tony Blair, is this: the Bush administration argued that Saddam had to be disarmed in order to help Tony Blair and preserve the figment of a great international coalition. The only people who emerge with any credit are the neocons who embarked on war to remake the Middle East, and chose Iraq because, with a nasty dictator who killed his own people on an lavish scale, it was as good a place to start as any. Their war was honest and may yet prove successful.
Because We Could [New York Times]
The right war, the wrong reasons [nickdenton.org]