When Iraq first entered the public debate several months ago, my first thought was, " Huh? " I, and most of the country, had been laboring under the belief that we were right in the middle of something else — catching the guy who orchestrated the attacks of September 11. But as usual, I, along with most of the country, was wrong.

The argument is that Iraq has not let our weapons inspectors in to verify that he rid his country of weapons of mass destruction — a key condition to the end of the Gulf War. These " weapons " are a potent threat, George W. Bush alleges, since, as a fellow Muslim, Saddam Hussein is more likely to support the aims of Al Qaeda and may give some of those weapons to those who were involved in the 9/11 attacks. The lack of any compelling or publicly available evidence that Saddam is ready, willing, or able to do such a thing has, to date, had no effect on the urgency with which the president’s argument for war has been presented. The argument, if I understand it (which would require employing what I call " distractive reasoning, " a technique that I have not used since I was 12 and had to explain to my parents why I went to see Star Wars again instead of finishing my astronomy homework), is that Bush is still, tangentially, working on the whole 9/11 thing, but without doing anything that might result in actually finding Osama bin Laden.

To force Saddam Hussein to comply with our demand that we be allowed into his country in hopes that we find nothing ... for this, they want to send my little brother — who is part of the active military — off to war. Don’t get me wrong, he’ll go. Not happily, but he’ll go. And it’s important that countries don’t have weapons of mass destruction (excepting us, Russia, North Korea, possibly Pakistan, possibly India, and also maybe China, but definitely not any other Muslim countries).

Please don’t tell my brother or me that this war is about democracy, or our way of life. Tell us that it’s because we haven’t made all that much progress finding the guy who killed our friends, and the president likes to look like he’s doing something, anything, even if it is only obliquely related to the main task at hand, even if it means even more Americans will die. Plus, the president gets to publicly dominate a Muslim ruler who sometimes wears a turban, and who, if you squint real hard, looks sort of like Osama bin Laden (but only if he’s wearing the turban).

Back to the Thoughts on going to war index.