In his contribution to Die Zeit's series of answers to the question, "Should the U.S.wage a preventive war against Iraq?," Hebrew University Philosophy Professor Avishai Margalit agrees with some of the Bush administration's critics that there is no reason to assume that Saddam Hussein would give WMD's to al-Qaeda, since the radical Islamists see Hussein's secular government as an enemy as well. There is reason to be skeptical of this argument: wars often make strange bedfellows.

But Margalit's strongest point lies elsewhere. Terrorism aims at causing an "overreaction from its victims." These victims -- in this case, us -- will then lash out and create more suffering, a result that the terrorists can then use in their attempts to recruit new followers. The aims of al-Qaeda, which Margolit calls a "trotskyist offering of a permanent and universal islamic revolution," meet up with poverty, youth, and failed states in the islamic world to heighten the dangers attendant on U.S. overreacting. Add the 150,000 Iraqi deaths in the last war, a figure more likely to be found in foreign media coverage of the issue than in U.S. coverage, and you've got a good reason to doubt the wisdom of an attack, or at least an attack in which the U.S. plays the central role, and in which the U.S. seems to be acting in a hasty fashion.

I discussed Mark Lilla's essay in Die Zeit's series on Friday, see here, and you can read the series as a whole here. Once I've figured out what Richard Rorty is saying, I'll tell you what I think about his essay, too.