As war inches closer - oh, by the way, Michael Tomasky here, filling in for Eric Alterman - it's worth stepping back and remembering how all this started, because even though it has been written, I'm still astonished by the number of smart people I run into who don't know any of this history, which makes it clear that the real reason we're doing this war in this way at this time is basically to prove to the world that we can.
This history does not start with September 11. It starts in the spring of 1992, when Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense, a job that, at that point, he fully expected to hold for another four years. That March, a document called the Defense Planning Guidance (read about it here and here, among other places) was leaked. The document described for the first time the Cheneyite vision for America's role in the post-Cold War world. It spelled out a policy toward the rest of the world, even our allies, that was far more unilateral and belligerent than anything that any postwar American president, Ronald Reagan included, had ever envisioned.
It said that the United States had to be, as Colin Powell put it at the time, "the bully on the block." This meant that other nations would have to understand that it's our world, they're just living in it; no other superpower could even think about emerging; collective action was rejected (NATO won a partial exemption here, but only partial) in favor of "ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted"; preventive military action would prove necessary, somewhere, just to make the point that it was our prerogative to do so (the DPG mentioned Poland, Lithuania, the Philippines, North Korea, and Iraq); and more. The writing of the document was overseen by Paul Wolfowitz. When it was leaked, it was widely denounced as bellicose to the point of being unhinged. Bush 41 said this ain't our policy, noway nohow.
But of course, Bush 41 - always regarded as suspiciously Trilateralist by this gang - lost. Cheney and Wolfowitz were forced to bide their time. And now it is our policy. An updated DPG was issued in the summer of 2002, then, finally, on September 20 of that year, the Bush 43 National Security Strategy (the best single piece on all this was David Armstrong's "Dick Cheney's Song of America," in the October 2002 Harper's, but I'm looking at the mag's Website and it doesn't seem to have an on-line archive).
THINGS FALL INTO PLACE
This is a long story that I need to make short, but in sum: Once you know this history, certain things fall into place, like:
Why did Donald Rumsfeld, at 2:40 pm on the afternoon of September 11, with sirens still blaring in lower Manhattan, say of the attacks "best info fast: Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL"? Because he, Wolfowitz, et al. had been looking for an excuse to go after Hussein since they took office.
Why did Iraq become more important than Al Qaeda? Because if you read the documents you see that the decade-old fixation on American global dominance was always more about the Persian Gulf than virtually any other region in the world.
Why Iraq, not North Korea? Because if the point is to prove to the world that we can make war when we want where we want, it's better to start with a relatively "soft" target, i.e. one without nukes, that we can take down fairly easily.
Why all these shifting rationales on the reason for attacking Iraq? Because, buried in documents that few people read, there's a real reason, but it's one the administration doesn't particularly want to advertise.
Why the animus toward the United Nations and some NATO allies? Because a dominant United States would favor "ad hoc" assemblies over permanent alliances. There is little question that this administration would love to dump NATO if it could possibly get away with it.
And so on. This is the story. It's all there in documents.
AND THE DEMS?
I should note: Even with all the above information, you might still say, "Very well, but that doesn't make them wrong about Saddam." And it doesn't. But it does make them duplicitous, and it does demonstrate that the unnecessarily belligerent way they've gone about pursuing a commendable goal (removing Hussein), which has probably seemed inexplicable to a lot of Americans and certainly to many people around the world, is pretty explicable. They want to piss off the world. It's sort of the point.