Pondering, while dawdling around pretty Fox Point (all the trees & flowers flow'ring), how to respond to Joe D.'s comments.

Not that anybody besides Joe & Anastasios is interested, but anyway.

Joe. Your statements coalesce around 3 points, among some others:
1) confronting "the lie" (ala Heart of Darkness);
2) the evasions of the Bush position before the latest war;
3) the relation between speech, dialogue & ethics.

I respond in reverse order:
3) In an ideal world, all problems will be resolved through peaceful dialogue & negotiation. But let's remember that in a non-ideal world, NOT ONLY do we witness the prevalence of the use of force & violence to serve selfish interests; we also witness the futility of language. We see false dialogue and timeserving debates carried on not just by the affected parties in a situation, but by 3rd parties taking advantage of crises by self-serving obfuscation & abuse of language. Sometimes "consensus" is impossible when you have the opposing interests of 2 or 3, meddled with by 15 other interested or "neutral" parties. For example, to read what happened at the UN before the latest war as simply a morality tale about US arrogance, is quite reductive; I think it is hard to deny that the stress of the crisis pressed France & Germany into hypocritical, self-serving positions, which underwrote Saddam's crazed intransigence.

2) I disagree with you that Bush Administration behavior leading up to this war was rendered ambiguous & murky by lies & hidden agendas. You seem to have 2 sides to your position : 1st, that Bush et al. have a hidden agenda(s); 2nd, that their vaunted "moral clarity" is in reality verbal cover for the unilateral use of force.

I think they have been pretty clear & forthright about their agenda. After 9/11, a global war on terror was declared; regimes engaging in terror, harboring terrorists, or unlawfully dealing in WMDs, would be considered enemies of the US and subject to attack. They had a difficult case in attempting to align the UN for war against Iraq, for lack of specific evidence of immediate threat; but I think their overall position was strong and convincing. The sanctions arrangement was a brutal failure; Saddam & his criminal mafia had ejected weapons monitors back in 1998; Saddam refused to comply fully with resolution 1441 (the 12000 pp document was a joke). It is clear in the aftermath that Saddam chose intransigence & self-defeating delusion, because his entire regime was built on oppression, lies & violence; he had no fallback position.

I think the second part of your argument (moral clarity as verbal cover), is more interesting, and leads to a consideration of your point #1): the supreme value in confronting "the lie".

There was an interesting article in the Week in Review section of the Sunday Times, about the genealogy of the Bush neo-cons from philosopher Leo Strauss. Somehow, when disciples of Strauss like Wolfowitz & Perle move into power positions, the philosophical notion that ethical absolutes are just that, and were outlined clearly for our civilization by the ancient Greeks, gets elided or translated into a concept of political "realism", wherein power or force can be projected in an aggressive way as long as the moral purpose or aim is clear and correct. This is not that different from the traditional "realists" of foreign policy, except that the latter were maybe more circumspect about projecting arrogance along with power.

The whole situation seems extremely new & complex, & doesn't lend itself to snap judgements or finger-pointing from any side. There is some truth in the analogy between the challenge represented by Islamic fundamentalist terrorism & state tyranny (Iraq, Iran, N. Korea) combined with weapons dealing, on the one hand, and the challenge represented by totalitarianism in the previous century, and I think that those self-righteous ones who don't want to sully their moral platitudes or their knee-jerk hatred of the US government with considerations of historical reality, are not really engaging in any useful activity in the realm of foreign policy. Another side of the equation, however, is the imbalance throughout the world between stable & rich 1st-world democracies, and the poverty-stricken regions of the Middle East, Asia, Latin America & Africa. Here is where the severe limitations of moral self-righteousness and a concept of national security based solely on military might become very clear. It's mirrored in a domestic policy which has found a way to equate "moral realism" with social darwinist individualism and laissez-faire.

& this leads me to a third aspect of this whole situation that interests me, and get's at the notion of your point #1 (confronting "the lie"). I think it might be good to look at the Straussian world-view of the power-playing neo-cons, not in isolation, but as an element of Republican party politics. In other words, it's USEFUL to develop an aggressive, power-projecting foreign policy grounded in the "moral clarity of Western democratic tradition" - since it provides a raison d'etre for a national party with a somewhat narrow demographic base, in the absence of Cold War stringencies.

Maybe I'm moving here in the direction of a John Kerry : attempting to combine a forthright attitude toward terrorism & dictatorship, on the one hand, with a demystification of a (partisan) politics based solely on glorified "force projection", on the other.