Today I’m impressed by the number of thoughtful anti-war postings over at www.LewRockwell.com, the libertarian site. I’m going to provide a series of links to some interesting perspectives, just below.

I can’t say I share the libertarian unwillingness to use American military power. But I do agree that the Iraq war seems to have been sold to us on willfully mischaracterized evidence of Saddam’s threat.

I wonder how history will treat the Iraq war. With exception of the hardest core supporters on the right wing, I expect we’ll be open to an unflattering version of history.

Here are just a few of the unflattering things that I predict historians will write about with a high degree of acceptance, eventually anyway:

• Iraq was a lesson in the arrogance that flows from one party dominance of government.
• Iraq was Bush II’s folly stemming from some or all of the following deep-seated complex desires: 1) To correct his father’s mistake in not taking out Saddam in the early 1990’s, or 2) to punish Saddam for trying to kill his father or 3) to upstage his father by doing what his father couldn’t in the first Gulf War.
• Iraq resulted from the stiffling of strong reporting, due to the culture of Right Wing Shouting Political Radio, Religious Political TV and Radio, and FoxNews-TV, that successfully discredited any early attempts to critically report on or verify Bush’s war arguments. Hence, we must be wary of the cultish tendencies of right wing media and their powerful politico-religious allies.

—- End of silly specualtion —–

Now for some links to lots of food for thought:

• Some Cynical Thoughts on the Iraqi Constitution
• Chickenhawk History
• Mad Wars -
  “Mad Wars Destroy in One Year the Works of Many Years of Peace.”
• Machiavelli and U.S. Politics
• Our Arrogance Will Be the End of Us
• BONUS from the NYTimes’ Frank Rich: The Vietnamization of Bush’s Vacation

It’s easy to dismiss/disagree with all of that stuff above, depending on your persuasion, but it’s not so easy to persuasively argue with it!