Tim Blair finally concedes (only implicitly) that opponents of war aren’t anti-American, saying “It’s all about Bush. These people are as shallow as Lake Eyre .”

Tim, and other warbloggers who have taken the same line, are showing the shallowness of their own thinking. Of course it’s about Bush and his Administration. In any war, the questions “What are we fighting for” and “Who are we fighting for” are at least as important as “Who and what are we fighting against”. Having judged that the Bush Administration is consistently dishonest and pursues policies based on a narrow calculation of the short-term interests of the United States (and in domestic policy, only the wealthiest inhabitants of the United States), I’m unwilling to follow them into a war if I can avoid it.

In the particular case of Iraq, if you don’t believe the statements of the Bush Administration, the core of the casus belli, namely the need for immediate action on WMDs, collapses completely, as does the claim that war with Iraq will assist in fighting terrorism. And if you don’t trust them to engage in constructive democratic nationbuilding in the aftermath of a war, the humanitarian case for war also fails.

Update Kevin Drum reaches much the same conclusion, based particularly on the exposure that claims about Saddam’s nuclear capabilities (which were, at one time, central to the Administration case for war) were based on clumsily faked documents. Kevin attributes the Administration’s acceptance of these documents to incompetence rather than dishonesty, but the logic is the same.

For a variety of reasons related to post-war planning and Bush’s seeming indifference about tearing down international institutions in order to get his way, I’ve been on the fence about war with Iraq for several weeks now. Basically, I figured that all it would take is one more thing to send me into the anti-war camp, and I think this is it. If we’re planning to start a war based on intelligence from the same guys who made this mistake, it’s time to take a deep breath and back off.

I still believe strongly that we need a tough-minded long-term policy aimed at eradicating terrorism and modernizing the Arab world (among others) — and that this policy should include the use of force where necessary — but not this time. This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

Further update Jean-Paul of The Agonist has also switched away from support for war, calling the bogus claims “One lie too many”. Josh Marshall reaches the same conclusion, on slightly different grounds.

The pros and cons of handling Iraq have never been separable from how you do it, the costs you rack up in the doing of it, calculated against the gains you’ll get in having accomplished it. At this point, we truly have the worst case scenario on the international stage. And I think that those costs now outweigh the gains.

(links via Matthew Iglesias. And the NYT has also switched. It’s pretty clear that it’s now or never (or at least not for a long while), as far as war is concerned. The latest evidence means that Powell’s UN dossier, which still forms the core of the Administration case, has been comprehensively discredited (the only substantial evidence still standing is that from the telephone intercepts, which are essentially uncheckable). It will take a week or so for this to sink in among people who follow the news less closely than those I’ve cited above, but the decline in support for war is only going to accelerate.