Given that it's not so far been settled to everyone's satisfaction exactly what the belligerents had in mind when they went to war in 1914, we shouldn't perhaps get too impatient as the junta who ordered up the invasion of Iraq try to settle on a postwar reason for having done so that will make those of us who remain unretractably opposed to it seem to be sulking, or even Saddam-friendly. The happy obliteration of the dictator and his Baathists was, we're asked to accept, a benevolent act and good reason on its own for having a war, trumping the merely provisional reason that is currently being re-aired more and more desperately: the existence of weapons made unduly lethal in the public mind by their invisibility.

LRB 19 June 2003 | PDF Download