…also passes along the following anonymous email she received from “a political consultant I know in Boston”:

“All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are

going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam

Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war

to preserve the UN’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that

the UN’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word

to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not

to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?”Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the

democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too,

because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a

little thing like democracy as they define it.

“Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot

afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against

Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are

sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that

might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does.

“And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us

oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in

power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people

elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice

but to ignore them.

“Listen. Don’t misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members

of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only

wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the

Looking Glass” are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on

the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing

for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because

he is a threat to peace,’ but not amusing for someone who actually

commands an army to say that.

“As a collector of laughable arguments, I’d be enjoying all this were it

not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost

in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.”