In its July 19 leader, The Economist stands by the case it made for the Iraq war. Since The Economist also likens the Bush administration's unchecked restrictions on civil liberties to those of South Africa's apartheid regime and calls the administration's plan for military tribunals for trying "enemy combatants" unjust, unwise and unAmerican, it is worth considering this newspaper's case.

Of the three questions that The Economist seeks to answer in order to determine whether the war was justified, the first one is relatively easy to answer in the affirmative. Yes, there were good grounds to threaten Saddam with an imminent military attack if he didn't comply with the UN resolutions.

The second asks if there were good grounds for carrying out that threat when he didn't comply. Yes, says The Economist, unless...

Messrs Bush and Blair are shown not just to have exaggerated but actually have lied, knowingly putting false information before their voters...(and) such a scandal would have to amount to clear evidence that it had not, in fact, been reasonable to believe that Mr Hussein was a dangerous liar and concealer...

Of course Saddam was/is all of those things and I'd even add that he was a brutal despot and that the Iraqi people needed to be free of him. So, no matter what liberties Bush and Blair may have taken with the intelligence on him (or lack thereof), the war cannot be anything but justified. Case closed, I thought and went on to the United States section of the issue that began by reporting that our President was in the throes of a political mid-life crisis. The administration headed by the man who entered the White House saying that he'd "repair the broken bonds of trust" was apparently saying a lot of things that "stretched credulity." Even though the story assured me that Bush's current troubles were "mild" in comparison to Clinton's prevarications about his peccadilloes and even though I am no Clinton-lover, that old, familiar uneasiness returned with a vengeance.

I thought of the administration's bed-sharing with a certain Enron executive; I thought of Bush's virtual gutting of the Freedom of Information Act with the sweet advantage of shielding his dear, old dad from its embarrassments; I thought of Rumsfeld's dealings with a guy with the same name and co-ordinates as the deposed Iraqi dictator; I thought of the Iraqi reconstruction contracts that fell into the lap of Halliburton, our Veep's not-so-old haunt. This was the administration that rid the world of a "dangerous liar and concealer"? This is who "leads" the world today? This is whom the Iraqis must accept as their "liberators"?

I was compelled to go back to the leader and see how The Economist answered their third question:

After the military victory, have the allies acted in such a way as to make things better both in Iraq and in the region as a whole?

The answer was essentially that the jury is out but with cautious optimism about an affirmative. For the sake of the Iraqi people and ours, I share the optimism. Towards the end, the leader ponders whether the US will remain committed in Iraq. Again, for the sake of the Iraqi people and ours, I do hope so. However, as the leader points out, that's not what happened in Afghanistan and I agree that that is "tragic and shameful." Now why was it that none of our Congressfolk asked the administration for a progress report on Afghanistan before jumping on the attack Iraq wagon? And why was it that not too many of us wondered why the administration did not tout its achievements in Afghanistan to make its case for all the good that would come out of our liberation of yet another country?

--aslam

2:09:23 PM