Why Did We Go to War against Iraq?

According to Atrios’ timeline, we’ve now entered the first phase of a long process that will end in war:

Winter/Spring – The clone army of foreign policy "experts" fromconservative foreign policy outfits nobody ever heard of beforesuddenly appear on all the cable news programs all the time, frowningfuriously and expressing concerns about the "grave threat" that Iranposes. Never before heard of Iranian exile group members startappearing regularly, talking about their role in the nuclear programand talking up Iran’s human rights violations.

Which sounds about right–we may have even entered the Spring/Summer phase of the liberal hawk.

The thing is, though, we have yet to figure out why we fought the last war. It wasn’t the WMDs. It wasn’t an attempt to spread democracy. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to knock off all the dictatorships in the region like dominoes. And it has only inflamed the Islamic fundamentalists in the region.

So before we go off to launch the next war, it’s time we had a really honest discussion about why we launched the last one.