I'm observing the fourth anniversary of Wretchard's notorious/notable Three Conjectures (strictly, it's closer to the anniversary of Smokin' Joe Katzman's "Touchstones" survey piece) ...by more or less letting veteran WoC commenter J Thomas have his way with it, and related memes. I altered some capitalization and removed hard line breaks, but the work is otherwise as he delivered it to me.
Start your engines.
{Note: A version of this post has already appeared in a Winds comment thread}
Mr. Thomas writes:
Here is the best argument I ever heard for invading Iraq. It went like this:
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US foreign policy is completely out of control. Whenever the US public goes crazy and demands that we do something insane, US foreign policy does what they want. Now, after 9/11 it's only a matter of time before Muslim terrorists get a nuke and set it off in an American city. This is inevitable. The terrorists will get nukes, no possible doubt. They will smuggle them into the USA. They will nuke us. Anybody who doubts this is an idiot. And after the terrorists nuke us, we will nuke every Muslim nation. This also is inevitable. We will have no choice, the US public will go crazy and the US government will do what the public wants.
The only possible way to avoid this holocaust is for us to convert every Muslim nation into a secular liberal Israel-loving state. Once we convert all the Muslims into atheist consumers who're trying to live the American dream, the threat from them will be over and we won't have to kill them all. So it's our duty to do this because the only alternative is so horrible.
Looking over which country to invade first, Iraq is the only choice. Syria is off in a corner. Libya is irrelevant. We can't invade our Arab allies, and countries that share a border with Israel have too many complications from that. Very very hard to invade Iran until Iraq is on our side. So Iraq must be first. We invade Iraq, install a secular liberal democracy, revive their economy so they're a shining beacon to the rest of the middle east, and then most of the other countries will fall without a fight. But if they do fight we'll have the central location -- from Iraq we can strike in any direction.
It's the right thing to do. Never mind the fog about international law and needing a pretext to attack and all that. We have to do it, because the only alternative is some US cities get nuked and then every Muslim in the world dies. No matter how unlikely it is to work, no matter what it costs, it's the only moral choice. If we give it our very best try and then we have to nuke them, at least we gave it our best try.
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To my way of thinking this reasoning is completely batguano insane. But it holds together. Once you accept the assumptions everything fits. It's the only explanation I can say that about. None of the other explanations fit together logically, and this one does.
It's crazy, but it's the least crazy justification I've heard so far.