A good article called "A Dove's Guide: How to Be an Honest Critic of the War." Via Eugene Volokh.

Thoughts after reading it:

As I noted a little while back, my main (personal, far from professional) reservation about the possibility of U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is that we will not in fact commit the resources necessary for the tough task of democratic transitioning Iraq -- and, yes, I'm using "transition" as a transitive verb on purpose, because I can't think of a correct verb that would capture what I think the administration is proposing here. Perhaps "Marshall planning" Iraq.

I am not attempting to use geeky grammatical tactics as an excuse for argument, either. I am asking for a little slack because it's late and I really should be going back over my notes on American federalism for my lecture tomorrow morning. But I am ambivalent about the neoconservative optimism regarding a democratic post-war Iraq, an optimism that I labeled "naive silliness" in an earlier blog. On the one hand, the idea of a democratic Iraq is very attractive for numerous reasons. I doubt that anyone but a truly cruel person would mourn the passing of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, at least if that regime were replaced with something less horrific. On the other hand, though, the dream of a democratic Iraq created under the aegis of a U.S. occupation really does strike me as a "too good to be true" story about the benefits of the projection of American power.

The strongest argument for going to war against Iraq -- regardless of the number or strength of our allies or our opposition -- is the alleged connection between Iraqi weapons production and terrorism. And this is an argument where solid proof of a connection would help, but, because of the catastrophic results of a successful terrorist attack with WMD's, anything looking like proof needs to be weighed pretty heavily. Grind out the results of a prudent risk calculation and a low-probability catastrophic event is still very worrisome. I'm thinking here strictly of the reasons that I believe are likely to weigh heavily in this administration's actual thinking when it allocates its resources. My conclusions are based on my reading of the administration's justifications for its own actions. I obviously don't have a mole in the White House, so whatever I say is what it is, and nothing more.

That said, it seems to me that the objective of preventing low-probability catastrophic events is expansive enough to crowd out longer term goals, like the massive financial and military commitment that would be necessary to "establish" democracy in Iraq. Maybe I'm wrong. And perhaps Afghanistan, Haiti, and Somalia are not the best historical cases for use in judging what an American projection of force for the purpose of establishing democracy in Iraq would look like. But U.S. involvement in Haiti and Somalia between 1992 and 1995 did cost $1.6 billion and $2.2 billion, respectively. Read the GAO report here. One would think that an occupation of Iraq is likely to be much more expensive, especially if international help is fairly limited. Add to that cost the difficult security measures that are likely to be necessary to sustain any kind of serious commitment to what Bush derisively called, in a more secure and complacent time, nation-building.

My worries have a natural limitation: it's not easy to peer through the fog of a postwar peace, of course. But arguments that attack the optimism of the regime builders also aim at the optimism that the Bush administration is trying so deperately to instill, through its swaggering rhetoric and confident reminders of American military predominance, namely, that American power and American technology can actually remake the world in its own image, one terrorist-harboring country at a time, and, in the end, eradicate terrorism entirely. We would certainly like to feel secure in the face of the terrorist threat; projections of power have a kind of magical significance to ward off the fear.

Here's the question in a nutshell: are proposals for remaking postwar Iraq proud invocations of the heritage of the Marshall plan, or reminders of the hubris of the "strategic hamlet"? I honestly do not know, but my gut says it's the latter.