A paid writer, at work.

(CAUTION: I get a little political here. Move on if my occasional descents into such territory annoy you.)

In the course of a "grab bag" post, John Scalzi says this about the Iraq War:

"Look, I know that the people in the White House can never, ever say that the real reason we went into Iraq was because Saddam tried to put the hit on Dubya's dad. But can the rest of us just stop pretending it was anything more than that? Please? And remember, I supported going into Iraq (on the grounds that Saddam was about 12 years past his expiration date), so I don't think I can just be written off as another liberal whiner on this point. I supported our president's decision to go to war on Iraq. I had absolutely no illusions as to why he decided to do it. Indeed, I submit that had 9/11 never happened, we'd still have had tanks trundling through Baghdad one way or another -- because Dubya would have found a way to make it happen. It was personal. Saddam was dead meat as soon as the Supreme Court gave Dubya the keys to the White House."

That fits my position almost exactly. I mean, almost exactly.

A friend of mine who is considerably more liberal than I (!) remarked to me when Bush was sworn in, "How long before we're at war with Iraq again?" I confess that my answer was, "Probably not that long, I imagine."

My whole wishy-washy position on invading Iraq was always that I thought it was probably the right thing to do, and Bush thought it was the right thing to do, but my reason for thinking so wasn't the same as Bush's. (And I do not buy for one second that Bush himself bought into the whole "We need to remake the Arab world" thesis, since he never said that. And if he did believe it, then I think he's a pretty craven leader for never once trying to make his real case.)

That's why I was nervous before the war and why I'm nervous now: two people may agree on what to do, but if they disagree on why, sooner or later some pretty big gaps will open up between them. If you have two different chess players each facing an identical board, and they each move the same knight to the same square, but one justifies it on the basis that it will allow a line of attack for his rook and bishop, while the other justifies it on the basis that he really likes horsies, well, one shouldn't expect the two games to reach the same result in the end.