Of course, such idiocy got my blood boiling. Apologize for the war? Yeah, Saddam wasn't really so bad, was he? They stop just sort of going all glazed-over nastalgic, but only just.
Honestly, the idea is moronic. I don't know if I'm really a neocon, though I suppose when it comes to the war I am. And I am not going to apologize, because I see no reason to. I'm not an ends justify the means kind of guy. Saddam was a brutal dictator who deserves what hes going to get, and it should've been 12 years ago.
Oh, but the violence and death, right? So I guess Saddam's torture chambers were better, eh? Well, at least we didn't see them every day on the news, so what you don't know can't hurt you. Right? Sure thing. And as Christopher Hitchens said just the other day, the violence we see today is really just a part of the lingering effects of Saddam's rule. We waited 12 years too long to take this guy out.
The entire issue is basically devoted to the coming to power of "moderates" and more importantly the return of realists (who, as the WSJ has noted here, "deny reality, and embrace an ideology where talk is productive and governments are sincere"; see also this article). Of course, realists want "stability". Well, I'm a neocon, and I think stability is overrated. I happen to think it was right to take out Saddam and his murderous regime. Here is, again (I don't know how many times I've pointed this article out) perhaps the best column of the year, by Mark Steyn, worth quoting at length for the sheer brilliance it is:
Three years ago, in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it fell to the then prime minister of Canada to make the most witless public statement on the subject by any G7 leader.
"Your president has won," Jean Chretien told ABC News in early March 2003. So there was no need to have a big ol' war because, with 250,000 American and British troops on his borders, Saddam was "in a box." "He won," said Mr. Chretien of Bush. "He has created a situation where Saddam cannot do anything anymore. He has troops at the door and inspectors on the ground... You're winning it big."
That's easy for him to say, and committing other countries' armies to "contain" Iraq is easy for him to do. A quarter million soldiers cannot sit in the sands of Araby twiddling their thumbs indefinitely. "Containment" is not a strategy but the absence of strategy - and thug states understand it as such. In Saddam's case, he'd supposedly been "contained" since the first Gulf War in 1991, when Bush Sr. balked at finishing what he'd started. "Mr. President," Joe Biden, the Democrat Senator and beloved comic figure, condescendingly explained to Bush Jr. in 2002, "there is a reason your father stopped and did not go to Baghdad. The reason he stopped is he didn't want to be there for five years."
By my math, that means the Americans would have been out in spring of 1996. Instead, 12 years on, in the spring of 2003 the USAF and RAF were still policing the no-fly zone, ineffectually bombing Iraq every other week. And, in place of congratulations for their brilliant "containment" of Saddam, Washington was blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids - or two million, according to which "humanitarian" agency you believe. The few Iraqi moppets who weren't deceased suffered, according to the Nobel-winning playwright and thinker Harold Pinter, from missing genitals and/or rectums that leaked blood contaminated by depleted uranium from Anglo-American ordnance. Touring Iraq a few weeks after the war, I made a point of stopping in every hospital and enquiring about this pandemic of genital-less Iraqis: not a single doctor or nurse had heard about it. Whether or not BUSH LIED!! PEOPLE DIED!!!, it seems that THE ANTI-WAR CROWDS SQUEAK!!! BUT NO RECTUMS LEAK!!!!
A NEW study by the American Enterprise Institute suggests that, aside from the terrific press, continuing this policy would not have come cheap for America: if you object (as John Kerry did) to the $400-600 billion price tag since the war, another three years of "containment" would have cost around $300 billion - and with no end in sight, and the alleged death toll of Iraqi infants no doubt up around six million. It would also have cost more real lives of real Iraqis: Despite the mosque bombings, there's a net gain of more than 100,000 civilians alive today who would have been shoveled into unmarked graves had Ba'athist rule continued. Meanwhile, the dictator would have continued gaming the international system through the Oil-for-Food program, subverting Jordan, and supporting terrorism as far afield as the Philippines.
So three years on, unlike Francis Fukuyama and the other moulting hawks, my only regret is that America didn't invade earlier. Yeah yeah, you sneer, what about the only WMD? Sorry. Don't care. Never did. My argument for whacking Saddam was always that the price of leaving him unwhacked was too high. He was the preeminent symbol of the September 10th world; his continuation in office testified to America's lack of will, and was seen as such by, among others, Osama bin Laden: In Donald Rumsfeld's words, weakness is a provocation. So the immediate objective was to show neighboring thugs that the price of catching America's eye was too high. The long term strategic goal was to begin the difficult but necessary transformation of the region that the British funked when they cobbled together the modern Middle East in 1922.
Realism isn't really a strategy, its more like an absence of one. Let's cross out fingers and close our eyes and hope nothing bad happens. We can sit down with our enemies and settle things by conducting studies and setting up commisions. We can talk rationaly with murders and thugs, and those whose only objective is to kill us.
Spreading democracy may be like "making ice cream out of sand" to Time, but it is really the only solution. And if it doesn't work, nothing really will. Everything else is just short-sighted "realism".
Apologize? Ridiculous. The only thing to apologize for is waiting 12 years to do it.
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