I don’t think Jim Henley and I could be further apart on foreign policy if the two of us sat down and thought up ways to be so, but I’ve found his recent coverage of some fog-of-war issues indispensible. Whether it’s the mysterious firefight in Samarra or the seemingly less-than-reliable Iraqi military official who insists to this day on the veracity of the “45 minute WMD deployment” claim, Jim’s been there to point out when the Emperor is finely shod and when he is, in fact, bare-ass naked. War supporters need good information same as war detractors; Jim’s done a fine job of separating the wheat from the chaff.
That being said, every once in a while he says something that makes me thank God I’m about 180 degrees away from him on a lot of this stuff. Case in point: his post today about Kosovo. “Patently illegal” and a “cruel farce,” Jim calls it, saying that “the Republican opponents [of the war] of 1999 were right.” Right to oppose a noxious, racist fascist’s grab for lebensraum–one in a seemingly endless series of such moves, one virtually guaranteed to end in the same sort of humanitarian disaster as his earlier ones? Jeez, Jim. Say what you will about Clinton’s half-assed war plan, Wes Clark’s woeful generalship, the intrasigence of the European community, and the unwillingness of the UN to actually solve any of the problems it’s nominally in charge of–hell, I’ll be right there bitching about them with you. That’s because that’s what’s to blame for Kosovo’s degeneration into its current criminal free-for-all, not our having fought there to begin with. The Kosovo War put an end to the territorial ambitions of the biggest murderer on European soil since the Stalinist puppet regimes, and eventually put an end to his reign, too–all too indirectly, but still.
Here, I suppose, is where I could do the whole “making the perfect the enemy of the good” routine, which is applicable, I think. But when you’re talking to someone who’s sufficiently… ambivalent, I suppose, about the government of Slobodan Milosevic to feel that the “illegality” of a war against it even merits mention, doesn’t it go without saying? I deplore the way the war and its aftermath have been botched, but you’ll never find me saying to myself that refusing to fight and defeat fascism was the right idea.