The Case For D*n B*este
By Although he’s blocked any access to the post Matt references here (and that earned him a special judges’ prize), Kieran Healy had the relevant excerpts:
De facto [France is] allied with Saddam even if there’s no publicly-declared treaty or agreement; so will they be willing to intervene militarily? Will they smuggle some sort of weaponry in? Or ship it in openly?
If 20 cargo jets take off from French territory and head towards the middle east, what will we do? If they ignore all attempts to prevent them from reaching Iraq, would we be willing to actually shoot one or more of them down?
Just how far are they willing to take their opposition to us? They’ve reached the point where it seems as if they’re willing to make any sacrifice. Do they see the stakes as being high enough so that they might actually threaten to nuke us?
The context, of course, being that the idea of opposing deposing secular a regime that posed no threat to the United States or France and replacing it with an Islamist quasi-state was so irrational that France must have been an actual enemy of the United States. This kind of lunacy really did pass for serious analysis among warbloggers (and propelled many of them to mainstream media gigs.) Who still make these kinds of arguments — remember Glenn Reynolds surmising that we haven’t engaged in an even more disastrous invasion of Iran…because of the nuclear weapons they already possess, presumably strapped to unicorns with a very long range.