Paul Krugman and I think alike a lot. In this piece on Bali (one of relatively few useful Op-Ed pieces on the bombings in the US press) he looks at the proposed war on Iraq in the light of a metaphor commonly used to describe economists.

Meanwhile, plans to invade Iraq proceed. The administration has offered many different explanations, some of them mutually contradictory, for its determination to occupy Baghdad. I think it’s like the man who looks for his keys on the sidewalk, even though he dropped them in a nearby alley, because he can see better under the streetlight. These guys want to fight a conventional war; since Al Qaeda won’t oblige, they’ll attack someone else who will. And watching from the alley, the terrorists are pleased.

I prefer another metaphor. “To a man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. For the last decade, Americans have been told that their armed forces are more powerful than the rest of the world put together, that they are the only superpower and so on. Although S11 shook this faith in some ways, the aftermath reinforced it in others. Bin Laden imagined himself safe in his caves in Afghanistan, backed by the Taliban fighters who had beaten the Red Army and the Northern Alliance. Within a few months, the Taliban had been destroyed and bin Laden himself was either a fugitive hidden in a cellar somewhere or (more likely I think) a corpse buried under tons of earth. In the whole process, the American casualties could be numbered on the fingers of two hands.
What is more natural, then, than to want to repeat this success? But the fragments of Al Qaeda have learned the lesson of Afghanistan. They are hiding in cities around the world and behind the skirts of people like Abu Bakar Bashir, who defy the authorities to produce the evidence of their guilt. Carrier battle groups and predator drones are of no use against this kind of enemy. So attention is focused on Saddam Hussein who is at least a plausible nail to be hit with the hammer of US military superiority.
It’s taken me a while to reach this analysis. I’ve never been satisfied with the idea that the US push for war on Saddam is ‘about’ oil, or imperialism or Bush family vendettas but I haven’t been sure what it is about. Now I think I understand it. I still think the advocates of war with Iraq are wrong, but this is the kind of error everyone is prone to, and one which I hope may be amenable to reasonable argument.