I haven't done a full-scale rant about an editorial from the NYT recently, but this one is too much to let slide. Shall we?

We urge the administration to brake the momentum toward war. Saddam Hussein is obviously a brutal dictator who deserves toppling. No one who knows his history can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. But this war should be waged only with broad international support. To go it alone, or nearly alone, is to court disaster both domestically and internationally.

It's a good thing that the administration isn't intending to "go at it alone, or nearly alone," as described in this article (which attempts to show the paucity of allies but ends up demonstrating the opposite). Or , as a certain NYT editorial states:
Britain, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Australia and a number of Persian Gulf states have offered military assistance or access to bases...

(That's the same editorial? More on that later.)

Mr. Bush has enough support among American voters to undertake the kind of clean, quickly successful military action his father directed in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. But every poll, every anecdotal reading of the American mood makes it clear that he has not sold the public on anything difficult or drawn out. Iraq is a large and complex Arab nation of 24 million people in the heart of the Middle East. America's overwhelming advantage in firepower might not prevent a prolonged period of street-to-street fighting in Baghdad that would be murderous to Americans and Iraqis alike. A desperate Iraq might try to attack Israel, disable Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields or even destroy its own oil industry before it fell into American hands. It might fire whatever chemical and biological weapons it has against American troops. These are risks that could be well worth taking, but the American public has not signed on for them. This nation should never begin a fight it is not prepared to carry out to the bitter end, no matter what the cost.

Well, as Bill Keller points out, President Bush's father had much less public support when he launched the first Gulf war. More to the point, I don't think anyone believes that the military phase of the battle will take a very long, even if every possibility mentioned by the Times editors occurs and causes casualties.
More fundamentally, the Times' editors "misunderestimate" the American public's likely response to the casualties if they occur. The Times' editors assume that the public's immediate response would be to turn tail and concentrate its fire on President Bush. But the majority of the public is not the Clinton administration after Mogadishu.
Bush may pay an eventual political cost, but what would happen first if Iraq used chemical weapons against our troops? Wouldn't the American public's initial reaction be a lot closer to "NUKE THE BASTARDS!!!" (Not that we should.) Outside of the Times' offices, the blame would first be focused on those actually responsible for the evil, as opposed to those who try to stop it.

That isn't true of this engagement, and the fault lies mainly with the president himself. Mr. Bush has never been open with the American people about the possible cost of this war. He has not even been clear about exactly why we are preparing to fight. Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. The first lesson of the Vietnam era was that Americans should not be sent to die for aims the country only vaguely understands and accepts.

Let's see... "Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. " DING-DING-DING - we have a match! The general criticism of the administration being unclear about its goals may have some merit, but is that the best the Times can do? Draft some bloggers - they'll tell you what to say...
And Vietnam pops up, for the first time...

The second lesson of Vietnam was that the country should never enter into a conflict without a clear exit strategy. We have nothing close to a plan for how, once in Iraq, we get back out again. Even if Mr. Hussein is easily eliminated, the United States will be left to govern and police Iraq for an extended period. Without clearly acknowledging the possibility to the American public, Washington could easily find itself involved in an open-ended occupation.

I'll let Max Boot handle the argument for the necessity of a clear "exit strategy." And perhaps the Times needs to review its archives; they might discover some references to an administration plan for postwar Iraq.

These risks would be tolerable if the rest of the world were working alongside the United States, prepared to share the danger of the invasion and — much more critically — the responsibility for creating a more humane and progressive Iraqi government in its wake. There are some threats and some causes that require fighting even if America has to fight alone, but this isn't one of them. And the world — like the American public — is not yet really convinced that a Hussein-free Middle East is a goal worth fighting a war for.
Britain, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Australia and a number of Persian Gulf states have offered military assistance or access to bases, but there should be no mistaking this ad hoc group for a united international front. France, Germany, Russia, China and even Canada are not on board. They may all have their parochial reasons for not joining the fight, but their resistance to war should be a powerful signal that if anything goes wrong — and something will go wrong sooner or later — the United States will bear the responsibility alone.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bush administration's campaign to get broader international support is the implication that France or any other nation that fails to get on board now will be cut out of the administration of postwar Iraq and its oil fields. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutality and freeing the world from the threat of his belligerence are causes worth fighting for. Winning control of Iraq's oil fields is not, particularly when the attacking nation is a country whose wasteful use of energy is an international scandal.

Even Canada? Say it isn't so!
More seriously, what's the likelihood that those nations' "parochial concerns" accurately noted by the Times' will be mollified by anything the US does in the future? And if, as the Times notes in the next paragraph, "[f]reeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutality and freeing the world from the threat of his belligerence are causes worth fighting for", does it become less worthy if those nations' parochial concerns prevent them from seeing it?

Forty years ago, the United States entered into a conflict in Southeast Asia with good intentions. When it emerged, it was torn at home and humbled abroad. The men and women now preparing to take the country into war in Iraq are, in the main, products of the Vietnam generation. They should be the first to remember how easy it is for things that begin well to end badly.

Here we are: the Times' true target is the Bush administration's unwillingess to learn the "proper" anti-military force lessons of Vietnam. With that viewpoint, it's easy to see how the U.S.' energy consumption patterns are a greater international scandal than the Franco-German axis of appeasement; how other nations' parochial interests overrule that which is worth fighting for, and all other forms of unsophisticated views which the rubes in the Administration insist on holding to despite the NYT's lessons to the contrary.