Arthur Silber has linked to a great essay on the war and why it may be necessary from John R. Searle, Mill Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkely. Here is a snippet:
Our inability to describe the situation is a symptom of a deeper misperception. Most of the public discussion I have heard in both the United States and Europe is based on the belief that because our actions are a result of the eleventh of September, that is what they are about, that we should primarily be seeking justice or revenge or some such.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Our actions should be directed at, for example, the 18th of July 2008. On that date six teams of terrorists working in six major American cities simultaneously detonate nuclear bombs whose parts have been carefully smuggled into the country over the years and whose assemblies and detonations have been coordinated. That attack kills over five million Americans. The nuclear attack is itself the follow up to several years of germ and biological warfare. Those who wish to kill us learn from their mistakes. Just as the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center benefited from the mistakes of the 1993 attack, so the anthrax pandemic of 2003 benefits from the blunders made by the early primitive mailbox anthrax of 2001. However, even after the pandemic of 03, it is obvious that anthrax is an inefficient method of biological genocide, because it is treatable. It is not until the PTP germ warfare of late 2003 and 2004 that fatal and untreatable germs are introduced in sufficient quantities to produce over a million U.S. fatalities. These weapons had been prepared in Iraqi laboratories in the years following the abandonment of UN inspections.
If these scenarios seem to you exaggerated, ask yourself what you would have said if someone had told you on September first that within two weeks the World Trade Towers would cease to exist. Or better still read the New York Times. On October 28th it reported a Muslim cleric as claiming that “Islamic extremists . . . had bought more than twenty nuclear warheads and were paying Soviet scientists to break them into chips that could be carried in suitcases.” …
Go read the whole thing. Via Dailypundit.