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I wrote a blog entry titled “Eve of Destruction” late Monday night, after watching Bush’s speech, driving home from the office and putting my kids to bed. I hadn’t planned on it, it just sort of tumbled out, and it was not prepared with any kind of extra care; it was more of a snapshot of a moment, for me, and a chance to pull together some of the strands of arguments I’ve developed here over the past nine months.

Dave Winer liked the post and asked me if he could redistribute it on his DaveNet mailing list. Since I’ve been reading DaveNet forever — my god, close to 10 years now! — I told him sure, I’d consider it an honor. And I welcome the chance for my writing and ideas to be placed under the noses of a different group of readers. In retrospect I wonder just a bit about the wisdom of pulling a single, heat-of-the-moment posting like this out of context; but on balance I’m sure it’s worth it.

Anyway, the little essay generated some heated response in e-mail to Dave that he has forwarded to me. It’s not worth trying to respond to every argument, and some of the criticism is just name-calling, but there are some points I want to address.

(1)The election. Several readers complained about my line about the 2000 election (“the electorate that did not really elect him”), with variations on “Get over it.” Well, I am over it. My purpose in bringing this up was not to reopen a heartbreaking old argument but to remind us all that the very closeness and contested nature of Bush’s election puts that much more burden on him to be the kind of president who works overtime to persuade doubters and to build coalitions. Instead we have a leader who behaves like he has the Mandate of Heaven. Rather than reaching out to those who oppose him, both at home and abroad, he and his lieutenants choose to thumb their noses at their allies (“old Europe,” etc.) and paint their political opponents as traitors. This would be bad behavior in any president; in one who attained office under such clouded circumstances it is inexcusable.

(2) The chances of war. My charge that Bush has failed to prepare the nation for possible setbacks yielded a range of retorts: From “How dare Scott Rosenberg assume to know that the President has not prepared the ground for setbacks. On what fact is this based? This is pure rhetoric” to “My What a weenie. Waah, waah, oh my god, things might actually get tough…”

The “fact upon which” this argument “is based” is pretty obvious. The word from this administration is loud and clear: “This will be over soon and it won’t hurt much.” No one, not least President Bush, has faced the American people and said, “War is dangerous and unpredictable and we do not know how this one will end. We hope this one will be short and limited in its bloodshed. But anything can happen once the fighting starts. And we do not know how long this war will last or how long our troops will need to remain in Iraq afterwards.” Bush acts as though victory is guaranteed, and victory is never guaranteed. Meanwhile, he has done nothing to build and buttress deeper support for his policies should they face unexpected setbacks. That is a matter of public record, not “pure rhetoric.”

In fact, the president and his allies in Congress have not even had the guts to tell us that the war is going to cost money and we are going to have to pay for it somehow. Their budget pretends that the war doesn’t exist. Why? Because at the same time we are spending hundreds of billions on this war, Bush wants to cut hundreds of billions from the tax bills of the wealthiest Americans — and leave his successors to worry about how to pay for Social Security and health care for senior citizens. This isn’t a mature leader calling for wartime sacrifice; it’s craven, reckless irresponsibility.

This has been Bush’s pattern from the start of the “war on terrorism.” After 9/11 the president had a rare opportunity to pull a wounded nation together in a cause that might have genuinely bolstered the security of future generations. He could have told us, like JFK and the race to the moon, “Energy independence before the decade is out!” And the American people would have pulled together, tightened their belts and done whatever was necessary to move us away from dependence on shaky, authoritarian governments in volatile nations full of people who want to kill us. A scenario like this would hold real hope for reducing the long-term threat of terrorism. But it’s simply unthinkable to Bush and Cheney.

(3) Playing into bin Laden’s hands. My discussion of the likely aftermath of American victory in Iraq drew comments like the following:

“Then, a gradual awareness: . . . That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists…” Sitting ducks? They have no capability to defend themselves? Believe me, when I was in the Marines, I knew how to call in mortars, artillery, air strikes and even naval gunfire from the USS New Jersey, which fired a round as big as a Volkswagen. And what was pounded into us in our training was to do exactly that, call in everything you can and wreak havoc on the enemy. I date myself with the description above. Now they put a laser beam on a target and it gets blown away.

This is precisely the problem — this letter-writer could not have done a better job of explaining it. After the war we will have tens if not hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq, ostensible to guarantee democracy. It seems entirely realistic to assume that the same Islamic terrorists who wish to blow up Americans in the U.S. will wish to blow them up in Iraq. The trouble is, in Iraq American forces will be surrounded by Iraqi Muslims. When the terrorist attacks begin, their training and impulse will indeed be to “call in everything we can and wreak havoc on the enemy.” But the “enemy” in this case will be almost impossible to distinguish from the Iraqi populace.

Americans will start blowing up Iraqis. Before you know it, the “liberating” force will become an occupying force, and Americans in Iraq will risk landing in precisely the same quandary as Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.

All of which is exactly what Osama bin Laden hopes will happen. On the larger chessboard, President Bush is getting trounced, because he’s only looking one move ahead.

(4) Appeasement all over again. Some readers raised the old “appeasement” comparison: “This [the invasion] must be done. Appeasement will only breed terrorists. Hitler is the best example.”

I feel like I’ve already knocked down this false historical analogy once, but let’s do so again. In the 1930s, European leaders faced a German dictator who made a series of demands about reparations, rearmament and territorial claims. Their response of giving in or compromising, in hopes that each new concession would be the last and finally put Hitler’s ambitions to rest, was a disastrous miscalculation for which the world paid a tragic, awful price. In every international conflict since, anyone who proposes a less than maximalist military response has been accused of being an “appeaser.”

Saddam’s regime may resemble Hitler’s in its totalitarianism and its cruelty, but beyond that the analogy simply falls apart. Iraq in 2003 is not, like Hitler’s Germany in the late ’30s, a mobilized military powerhouse seizing its neighbors’ territories; it is a nation hobbled by sanctions, chained down by international inspections and surrounded by hostile armies. Saddam has no demands that any other nation is paying any attention to; the world is united in the goal of disarming him, and divided only on the best means toward that end.

Troops are rumbling toward the border as I write this, and I can hear the voice of a “man in the street” interview on the radio this morning, saying, “This was going on too long — it’s time to end it.” And that seems to be the chief argument of those who feel that Bush is doing the right thing: Let’s get on with it. Enough, already. We’re tired of waiting.

Is that an adequate reason to begin a war, with all its attendant bloodshed, as long as a peaceful route remains open — as long as all other avenues have not been closed? If you want to disarm Saddam Hussein and make America safer, as of this week, you could still make progress toward that goal without sending the troops in. I don’t see how anyone can defend impatience as justification for an invasion.

Ratcheting up the rhetoric is an essential part of prewar propagandizing, so it’s no surprise that President Bush’s speech last night included a litany about “no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms.” This isn’t the reason we’re going to war, of course. We’re going to war to disarm Saddam, giving up on a peaceful process that was already disarming him, successfully — why do you think we need a force only half the size of what we needed in 1991 to pursue war against Iraq? — but too slowly for our leaders. If the war were about protecting dissidents and preventing torture and rape, we’d have our hands full all around the world. But language like this isn’t about logic, it’s about emotion; it’s designed to get us angry, so that we don’t think too hard.

Thinking, alas, is sometimes involuntary, and I flinched when Bush started talking about rape — not because I have any reason to doubt that that particular crime is on the roster of the evils of Saddam Hussein’s rule, but because, unfortunately, our own military has its own serious rape problem, that’s coming to light, inconveniently, on this eve of war. If you’ve missed the headlines, the story is of the United States Air Force Academy’s long history of essentially condoning the rapes of what seem to be hundreds of female cadets. These crimes and coverups are not isolated incidents, but indicative of a military culture that views rape as a minor offense — and that treats women who insist on reporting the crime as traitors to be drummed out of the ranks. Former Salon columnist Debra Dickerson writes movingly about this on today’s New York Times op-ed page.

Moments like the present offer a strange sense of suspension on the edge of a precipice. War is 99 percent inevitable. Yet I keep thinking, what if? Surely… But…

Forty-eight hours offers a million opportunities to leave the road we are on. But it is a road that Bush and Cheney chose long ago, and these are not the sorts of men to suffer 11th-hour pangs of remorse for unnecessary bloodshed.

The nation — and the world — know that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous dictator. The moral or strategic logic that makes this precise moment the time to depose him remains obscure, however. And in that obscurity we are forced back on the suspicion that the timing, for Bush, is a matter of political convenience (first war, then 2004) and logistical efficiency (can’t have a quarter of a million troops sitting around idly, losing morale). And those seem like poor reasons to begin dropping thousands of bombs and killing thousands of people.

The president’s speech tonight, full of the rhetoric of “liberty and peace,” was suffused with an almost millenarian triumphalism, an attitude of certainty in U.S. victory that is no doubt borne out by the superiority of American weaponry and power and that, yet, to anyone with a sense of the twists of history, seems fatuously arrogant. War is rarely easy; the speed of the victories in 1991 Kuwait or 2001 Afghanistan was, historically, the exception, and there is no guarantee that every future American campaign will be as fast or as painless to Americans. Overconfidence breeds disaster.

When you go in assuming easy victory, even the slightest setback feels enormous. President Bush has not prepared the ground for setbacks; he has not assumed the necessary burden of wartime leadership, whether through marshalling support for his plans overseas or through justifying his policies at home. Heaven help him — and us, the electorate that did not really elect him — if the road is longer or rougher than he and his team promise.

He has offered us a handful of weak words in place of a persuasive case; he has shuffled from one justification to another, shifting goals as the diplomatic climate altered; he has resorted to half-truths and outright lies and insulted the nations of the world by providing evidence that crumbled upon close inspection; and he has utterly failed to play a strategic game that looks beyond the next move. In the name of protecting the U.S. from terror attacks, he is launching us on a campaign of imperialism; in smashing open Saddam Hussein’s dormant nest of horrors, he will spread the seeds of destruction to a thousand new plots.

These are not just vague, eve-of-war fears. In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

In an op-ed, George Soros argues that the Bush administration’s overconfidence shares the characteristics of a market bubble: “I see parallels between the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception. For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable.”

It’s not the war itself we should worry about, but the aftermath, Soros argues: “Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Mr Bush counts on. But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.”

Interestingly, this view finds an echo in an extraordinary, overheated, fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by Oriana Fallaci, who thinks Bush and Blair are right to fight but that they (and we) may ultimately, like the defenders of the Alamo, be doomed:

Upheld by their stubborn optimism, the same optimism for which at the Alamo they fought so well and all died slaughtered by Santa Anna, Americans think that in Baghdad they will be welcomed as they were in Rome and Florence and Paris. “They’ll cheer us, throw us flowers.” Maybe. In Baghdad anything can happen. But after that? Nearly two-thirds of the Iraqis are Shiites who have always dreamed of establishing an Islamic Republic of Iraq, and the Soviets too were once cheered in Kabul. They too imposed their peace. They even succeeded in convincing women to take off their burqa, remember? After a while, though, they had to leave. And the Taliban came. Thus, I ask: what if instead of learning freedom Iraq becomes a second Talibani Afghanistan? What if instead of becoming democratized by the Pax Americana the whole Middle East blows up and the cancer multiplies?

It seems odd that only now, with a quarter of a million troops in the field and war hanging by a hair, is the debate beginning to turn to that ultimate question of any military conflict: What happens afterwards? Scariest of all is the thought that President Bush, who has so far botched the peace in Afghanistan, hasn’t grappled with it at all.

Last week I started getting bombarded with nearly identical e-mails about an Ohio congresswoman named Marcy Kaptur, who, I was told, ought to be ashamed of the awful things she had said — something about comparing Osama bin Laden to the founding fathers. Why these correspondents thought I should be apprised of Rep. Kaptur’s need to be ashamed, I did not know. But I had a pretty good idea: whenever this sort of e-mail bombardment begins, Rush Limbaugh is usually behind it. And indeed he was.

The record suggests that in fact Kaptur’s argument was more complex and historical than the dittoheads are able to comprehend. Douglas Anders of the Agora offers links and two commentaries on the whole affair. [Links courtesy Rogers Cadenhead]