Past, Present, Future: Amid all the clamor about the duplicitousness of the Bush administration, anyone who'd actually been listening to what the administration has said over the past two years would recognize that our real goals and justifications have never been secret. Did Bush "sell" the war in Iraq? Sure. And he did a masterful job of it. I think some of it was overreach, and the fallout from that has taken its toll. (But that fallout, too, is overreach.) For anyone who hasn't seen it laid out so neatly, here's Den Beste's outline form. An important excerpt:

III. Possible responses [to 9/11], small and large

A. Some advocated appeasement. Reduce our military spending, massively increase foreign aid, stop supporting Israel and throw it to the wolves, and apologize, apologize, apologize.

1. Historically, appeasement doesn't work.

2. There was no reason to believe it would work in this case, either; it would have emboldened all the extremists in the region, religious or otherwise, and encouraged further aggression against us.

3. This approach assumed that poverty and American foreign policy missteps were the primary cause of the anger. But there's no reason to believe that this is true. Most of those who died in the attack on 9/11 came from prosperous families, for instance.

4. If the true root cause was anger and resentment caused by Arab shame at lack of Arab accomplishment, massively increased aid would not help. You do not make a man proud by giving him charity.

5. Irrespective of any other arguments against this approach, it wasn't politically possible in the US. The vast majority of Americans were in no mood to accept such a solution. The domestic reaction to those who advocated it was nearly uniformly hostile.

B. The microscopic solution was to respond "proportionally" with a token counter-attack, and then deal with the situation as one of law enforcement, by attempting to find and arrest those who were implicated in the plot and to put them on trial for it after extradition.

1. That's what we did in the 1980's and 1990's, and it failed. bin Laden was already under indictment for previous attacks against us, and all diplomatic efforts to gain control of his person for trial over a period of several years had failed.

2. Doing this would have further reinforced our reputation as being cowardly. It would have raised the reputation of all terrorist groups by showing that terrorism was a valid (and successful!) way of striking back.

3. Such a response would have encouraged further attacks against us which potentially might have been far more devastating, if the terrorists had managed to gain access to some sort of extreme weapon.

C. The small solution was to assume that al Qaeda was the entire problem, and to eradicate al Qaeda and all others who could be shown to be directly involved in the attack in September of 2001.

1. If we had concentrated exclusively on al Qaeda it would have left intact other similar movements, equally dangerous but not directly implicated in the attack against us. al Qaeda launched the attack against us but were not the only ones who had the ability or will to do so, and other groups had been and had every intention of continuing to launch such attacks against other targets (e.g. Bali, Israel, the Philippines, Kashmir).

2. This would have been a case of treating the symptom, not the disease.

D. The large solution is to reform the Arab/Muslim world. This is the path we have chosen.

1. The true root cause of the war is their failure and their resentment and frustration and shame caused by that failure.

2. They fail because they are crippled by political, cultural and religious chains which their extremists refuse to give up.

3. If their governments can be reformed, and their people freed of the chains which bind them and cripple them, they will begin to achieve, and to become proud of their accomplishments. This will reduce and eventually eliminate their resentment.

4. Their governments would then cease needing scapegoats.

5. Their extremists would no longer have fertile ground for recruitment.

6. This is a huge and unprecedented undertaking; it will require decades, but ultimately it is the only way to really eliminate the danger to us short of the "foot-and-mouth" solution (which is to say, nuclear genocide).

Someone had to write it out.