The New Republic: The New Rationalizations to Support Iraq War..because the old ones didn't pan out.[
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The editors of The New Republic believed that assuming a nuclear-tipped Iraq could be deterred (given Saddam's history of reckless miscalculation and mass murder) was a naïve idea. They worried that, had President Bush's threats of war against Iraq passed without action, so would the world's (the U.N.'s) vigilance. The editors say they believed France, Russia, and China would likely always have feared a U.S. beachhead in the Arab world more than those countries feared Saddam Hussein.
Now comes the "but"....The TNR editors now say that waiting to confront Iraq would have allowed the United States to confront more immediate dangers. They admit that, in retrospect, we should have paid more attention to myriad warning signs about the truth behind the dismal intelligence. They say they feel regret, but no shame.
They cling to some of their initial moral reasoning to absolve them from shame as they believe Saddam's Iraq was "a moral cancer at the center of a region whose pathologies were threatening the world". Yet they underestimated the effect on the Iraqi people, now considering the forces of "fanatical Islam, America-hatred, and a penchant for conspiracy theories." They claim our (U.S.) inability to provide security has caused us to undermine ourselves and that as a result, this war's moral costs have been higher than they'd foreseen.
TNR searches for a moral reson to stay in Iraq, and they find it in the simple fact that they are, in a decidedly perverse sense, "free" and that we can assist them to remain "free".
They make what I consider to be a freshly-created naive statement: that people from the Arab and Muslim world are watching..that they "may not hate America any less than they did before the war" (
bullshite)....that, "for the time being, they may even hate it more" (
Oh, come on, TNR--let's keep things real. We've inflamed the Arab street). TNR's pie-in-the-sky musing is that, with the fall of Iraq's dictator, the people of the Muslim world can finally envision the fall of
their own dictators.
(*I have to add this:..."...
and America's leaders can lie to their people again so the U.S. can help them to overthrow their dictators."*)
TNR's editors, in their hand-wringing over being oh-so-wrong over the attack on Iraq, bring this all down to the United States triggering a debate about democracy in the Middle East as their one true morally-justified reason for our loss of almost 850 troops after two straight years of proven misleadings from our government.
I'm sorry, but there is such thing as healthy optimism in a realistic light. On the other end of the spectrum, there is pure delusion. If TNR still believes this war--the invasion of Iraq--still carries a glint of moral justice, I don't think they're naive--I think they're reaching..reaching.. in the hope of intuitive redemption and moral absolution.
