Noting Iraqi Gains
Christopher Hitchens, an actual liberal, writes about why the Iraq war was a good thing.
This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn’t condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya’s (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region’s keystone dictatorship.
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The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:36 am
Hitchens is a -former- liberal.
“Hitchens has said he no longer feels a part of the Left… Hitchens also became increasingly disenchanted by the presidency of Bill Clinton, whom he had known at Oxford, accusing him of being a rapist and a liar. Hitchens also claimed that the missile attacks by Clinton on Sudan constituted a war crime… Hitchens described himself as “on the same side as the neo-conservatives”"
Yes, an actual liberal. You make a one-sentence post and -still- manage to be wrong. That takes a special kind of ignorance.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Sigh…. I said actual liberal.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Actual: “obsolete : active” “existing in act and not merely potentially” “existing in fact or reality” “not false or apparent” “existing or occurring at the time : current” Unless you are trying to point out that Christopher Hitchens does exist, in act or fact rather than potentiality, and you feel a need to inform your readers of this, it seems hard to interpret your statement as meaning anything but “current liberal”.
“Modern American liberalism is largely a combination of social liberalism, social progressivism, and mixed economy philosophy.” Since we are modern Americans, I has assumed this was what you meant. Feel free to pick out a different definition of liberalism than modern American liberalism, but I can tell you right now that the other ones won’t wind up helping you.
If that’s not what you meant by those words, please explain. I have the feeling that you will (as usual) try to redefine your words in such a way as to dilute them to meaninglessness.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Jesus. Are you serious?