Apologies to Jim Henley for stealing his idea, but…
War is bad. However, war is not always the baddest. Sometimes it’s not even close.
Just because you support war doesn’t mean you can or should fight in it. I advocate a radical reevaluation of the Rolling Stones’s writing and playing habits, but I will not and should not be taking over vocal duties from Mick Jagger anytime soon. (Seriously, Jim, chickenhawk arguments? Even if you’re just kidding, that’s beneath you.)
Oppose the war? Fine. Cheering for people who, because they oppose the war, want to punish the Iraqis for no good reason? Not fine.
While it’s true that Al Qaeda can never transform America into an Islamist fascist theocracy, they and their friends, forerunners and supporters have in fact done this in an extraordinarily huge area of the world, and will continue to murder random Americans and others for as long as said theocracies exist, for this is the nature of said theocracies. So terrorism is the foremost threat to liberty in the world; and while I think the PATRIOT and VICTORY Acts are pretty dumb (much less dumb than things done by every other wartime administration in the nation’s history, yes, but still dumb), it takes a very, very narrow reading of both “America” and “liberty” to decide that Ashcroft and Rumsfeld are a bigger threat to either than terrorism is.
In general: Espousing doctrinaire isolationist/pacifist libertarian views to attack a war designed to end an expansionist, belligerent, fascist regime? I’ve got to admit that I just don’t get it. Or maybe I do, but because it stems from not giving a tinker’s damn about the rest of the world, I don’t want to.
Moving on, Iraq is not in chaos. Iraq is not spiraling towards chaos. Iraq is occasionally chaotic, but so is Mepham High School in Bellmore, Long Island. If you are being told that things are getting worse and worse in Iraq, you are being lied to.
If you are being told that President Bush ever said the threat from Iraq was “imminent,” you are being lied to.
If you are being told that David Kay and the weapons inspectors found “nothing,” you are being lied to.
I’m really, really, really tired of seeing news reports from the likes of NBC’s David Gregory, who in a transparently anti-Bush chat with Chris Matthews last week talked about how the Bush Administration’s drive to publicize the successful reconstruction going on in Iraq is “belied” by the urgency with which they were doing it, that the bad poll numbers (not so bad anymore, it would seem) stem not from lousy one-sided reporting but are the logical consequence of the number of K.I.A every day (as if that’s the only story in the whole goddamn country), that the weapons inspectors (here it is again) found nothing.
The truth is out there.