Why We Went to Iraq

This piece is an excellent reminder why went to Iraq. Here's a portion of
the column:

There is no way of convincing a certain segment of opinion that
there are indeed wars of "necessity." A case can always be made
that an aggressor ought to be given what he seeks, that the costs
of war are prohibitively high when measured against the murky
ways of peace and of daily life.

"Wars are not self-starting," the noted philosopher Michael Walzer
wrote in his seminal book, "Just and Unjust Wars." "They may 'break
out,' like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and
where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually
they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well
as human victims."

Fair enough. In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in
Iraq is Mr. Bush's war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this
war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization,
with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations
resolutions which called for Iraq's disarmament. It is the political good
fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama
was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the
war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote
against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood
up to the wind.

With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments
made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced:
The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect,
but they were made in good faith.