Jonah, all in all Will’s piece is quite good, except for one distortion. He writes:

Today a conservative administration is close to asserting that whatever the facts turn out to be regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the enforcement of U.N. resolutions was a sufficient reason for war. If so, war was waged to strengthen the United Nations as author and enforcer of international norms of behavior.

This isn’t exactly true. He intimates there were two reasons for going to war: threat of WMDs and/or enforcement of U.N. resolutions. But Will knows that there were several compelling reasons “war was waged.” If weapons are not found, the war was not just an exercise in strengthening the U.N. as author and enforcer of international norms. The Bush team is quite obviously attempting to reshape the Middle East. Will could argue this is not a conservative thing to do, and he’d be able to make a good argument. But this suggestion that the war was either for weapons or for the U.N. isn’t right, and Will surely knows that.