The notion that we invaded Iraq for “lots of reasons” — like so much else in the discussion of Iraq — misses the point. There was only one “reason” that permitted the President to take the country to war: the presence of weapons of mass destruction. The American people were and are viscerally opposed to the idea of pre-emptive war. In the absence of a threat, pre-emptive war looks to them very much like naked aggression. (In the absence of a threat, even the argument from principle would collapse. The administration’s stated preference for democracy was based on the asseveration that democracies don’t attack other countries.) It’s important to remember that WMD was not just one of a cluster of fungible “reasons” for war. It was the only reason for war. ~Neal Freeman, The American Spectator

Via Daniel McCarthy