To answer my earlier question, no, it’s not too late for a patriotic American to criticize the war the U.S. has just begun against Iraq.

Any decent person hopes against hope that casualties on both sides will be limited, that the war will be over quickly, and that peace may soon come to that troubled part of the world. But that does not make it wrong to criticize the war, because its having begun does not somehow endow it with purpose it did not have before.

The war is still unnecessary. It is still unwise. It is still an injudicious use of American military power that should be used to defend the United States against real threats, not hypothetical ones.

But now the question, as Tom Palmer put it so well, is what should a serious anti-war take on the post-Hussein situation should be. Gene Healy hopes in vain that there might actually be a way to turn the end of this war in a non-interventionist direction:

In a short while, we’ll be in a position to say we came, we saw, we flattened an anti-American regime. “We’re leaving now. Pretend to be democratic and don’t set up any terrorist training camps, or we’ll do it again.”

Except Iraq never set up any terrorist camps, which Healy knows all too well. But that aside, Dubya & Co. have already committed themselves to a lengthy rebuilding process, and it doesn’t seem clear to me that just leaving them to be is the responsible solution after decades of totalitarian rule, sanctions and war. Is that the grown-up response Palmer was thinking of? I doubt it.

What is the right way to go? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that the U.S. should not turn Iraq into a base for further adventures in the Middle East, antagonizing the entire Arab world even more than it already has. If there is a rebuilding job to do that takes two years before transitioning to an Iraqi republic with some kind of international peacekeeping/weapons inspections presence thereafter, so be it. That’s the boat we’re in now.

But Iraq should not be the first step toward anything. No one will be sad to see Hussein’s regime go. I won’t be. Let’s leave it at that.

It is interesting to me that so much public opinion seemed to rest on the fate of the matter in the United Nations. For months, public opinion pollsters told us that Americans’ view of a war on Iraq differed greatly depending on whether or not the U.S. could secure U.N. approval. Ultimately, though, the argument for or against the war rested not with the random assortment of nations on the U.N. Security Council but with the American people and their representatives.

Those representatives gave up the game early on, even before it got to the middle innings. Anti-warriors clung desperately to the hope that the U.N. could stave off war, like the crafty veteran left-handed pinch hitter subbed in for a pitcher in the bottom of the ninth. But as Dubya said in his press conference, “When it comes to our security, we don’t need anyone’s permission.”

That’s absolutely true. Do the American people disagree? They’re supporting the war now at a 70 percent clip. Are they suddenly convinced about the Iraqi threat in a way that they were not before? A threat is a threat is a threat. The truth does not depend on mere “world opinion.” The problem in this instance is that other countries’ self-interested opposition to the war happened to coincide with the truth.

Radley Balko writes that the discrediting of the U.N. may be the one good thing to come of this whole episode. Perhaps. It seems to me that the most likely result is a quick U.S. victory followed by the same kind of triumphalism seen after the Afghan victory, regardless of the subsequent return to lawlessness and tribalism there.

That triumphalism will reinforce the neoconservatives‘ worldview and their heft in the circles of elite opinion, and the rebirth of the kind of perpetual around-the-world war that was characteristic of the Cold War until Vietnam. From the fall of the Berlin Wall until Sept. 11, U.S. went to war in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. It was not a peaceful decade-plus. But it was an ad hoc policy borne out of naked self-interest (as opposed to self-defense), confusion, presidential self-aggrandizement and military-complex survivalism.

What we are faced with now is much more dangerous. It is an overarching ideology of American messianism which is inherently dangerous to American liberty, the very thing we are supposed to be defending against Al Qaeda and its filthy ilk. It is a distraction at best, and it is only beginning.

On the domestic front, the libertarian-conservative coalition that seemed triumphant with the 1994 elections is all but shattered. Yes, Dubya has gone further on Social Security choice than anyone else, but he gave up the game on vouchers and doesn’t even to pretend to care about restraining federal spending. The doctrine of “national greatness” will drown out the libertarian wing of the Republican Party and coalesce with the socially conservative wing to form a truly conservative with only hints of a classical liberal bent thrown in here and there for good measure.

And with whom will the liberty lovers be left? The Democrats, who couldn’t even muster a fight against a president who didn’t even win the popular vote two and a half years ago? The Democrats, whose long ago dedication to civil liberties and social freedoms (aside from abortion rights) has been swept under a tide of identity politics and political correctness? Please.

Here, then. Here is your war. Here is the bleak, bleak future of liberty in the world. Would you like some freedom fries with that?