Ever since a key rationale for the war to depose Saddam – existing stockpiles of WMDs – was debunked, the interesting theoretical question is: if we’d known then what we know now, would we still have launched a war? In general, I agree with Bob Kagan. We too often forget the consequences of the alternative: hideously cruel and corrupt sanctions, the maintenance of Saddam’s barbarism, the entrenchment of despotism in the Arab world, the encouragement of Jihadists who could interpret inaction as weakness, and the fact that sanctions would eventually have collapsed and that Saddam could have gotten his WMDs in the near future anyway. It would be dishonest to say I’m not chastened by the inept post-war, Abu Ghraib, the abandonment of the ban on “cruel and inhumane treatment” of prisoners, the resilience of the insurgency, the ineffectiveness of reconstruction and the loss of 12,000 Iraqi lives while we were responsible for their security. But I still think that, even knowing what we know now, the war was worth it, if only for the potential for Arab democratization that has opened up; and the end of Saddam’s brutality. Nevertheless, Spencer Ackerman makes some good cointer-points here. I link; you mull it over.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I agree with you about Durbin. While ineloquently phrased, the sentiment is true. We don’t expect our troops to do the things we hear about them doing in Gitmo. Still, any politician shoud be smart enough to know that comparisons to Nazis, Stalin, Khmer Rouge, et. al. are not only inaccurate, but going to create a terrible shitstorm. Instead, I’d recommend the words of the most America loving author, and a true literary giant. Here’s what he had to say about the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine rebellion:
“We have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandits’ work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world …” (Mark Twain, “On the Damned Human Race”).
I don’t think that even the far right is going to castigate Mr. Clemens for insufficient patriotism.”
The Dish 