3 Quickies that summarize my feelings on a variety of contentious issues rather well -

Arnold Kling on the Bush Legacy -

I have never felt comfortable with George Bush. I voted for Al Gore--although I never felt comfortable with him, either. I felt even less comfortable with John Kerry, so that I voted for Bush in 2004.

...I think that President Bush has got one thing very much right, which is that Arab-Islamic terrorism is a symptom that something is rotten in the Middle East. If anything, his failures in Iraq and Palestine are due to underestimating the degree of rot. For all the allegations of his lack of intellect, George Bush is a brainiac compared to people who want to see terrorism as a symptom of something rotten in the United States or Israel.

...I think that many people are tired of the bitterness and partisanship of the Bush era. My main point, however, is that people over-estimate the extent to which this bitterness and partisanship is due to George Bush himself.

StratPage on Assessing Iraq -

...the war is still not the major problem. Corruption and  incompetent  government are....There's no guarantee that this "war on corruption" will work, but things will remain bad if you do nothing. The Arab world is a mess because of the corruption.

...This exposes a truth that many refuse to acknowledge. Fixing countries isn't easy. The "civil society" that we in the West take for granted, cannot just be conjured up. The harmonious relationships that enable some democracies to work, are not a given. Those relationships often require a lot of bad habits to be changed.

...Iraq, and most of the countries in the Middle East, are broken. They have been for a long time. We in the West have generally ignored it, because there were no workable solutions that were easily available. Then came the latest wave of Islamic terrorism. This got worse, until September 11, 2001, and the prospect of mass murder in our own backyard became a reality... the threat of even deadlier terrorist attacks made more dramatic moves attractive. So here we are in Iraq, confronting the Arab problems up close and personal. It ain't pretty. But unless the Arab problems are solved, the ugly aftereffects will still be there, and so will the threat of mass murder on the street where you live.

Of course, I think that some of these appeals to reason will suffer from preaching to the choir.   If your toolkit focuses on Intentions rather than Consequences (or, in Kling's terminology, Type M vs. Type C arguments), the theses outlined here will fall on utterly deaf ears.

A perfect example of this type of reasoned, structured argumentation is found in Randy Barnett's explanation of why some libertarians  support the War (myself included) despite massive distrust of just about anything else the government does -

Other libertarians, however, supported the war in Iraq because they viewed it as part of a larger war of self-defense against Islamic jihadists who were organizationally independent of any government. They viewed radical Islamic fundamentalism as resulting in part from the corrupt dictatorial regimes that inhabit the Middle East, which have effectively repressed indigenous democratic reformers. Although opposed to nation building generally, these libertarians believed that a strategy of fomenting democratic regimes in the Middle East, as was done in Germany and Japan after World War II, might well be the best way to take the fight to the enemy rather than solely trying to ward off the next attack.