Norm Geras' circuitous, well-considered argument may make Leftie brains hurt, but it's absolutely sound:
"There was no moral case against the Iraq war, though there were creditable moral reasons for having doubts about the moral case for it."
The US accepted the role as the world's 911 by default as much as design, we cannot deny that role because it's hard, expensive or that we simply don't want to do it. It's part of the price for our freedom. Imagine what our lives and that of our children would be, if the any of the tyrants and/or ideologies we've defeated in the last century had prevailed.
We won the Cold war without a hot war and the Left took from it the wrong lesson; the peace bonus was not standing down our defenses and forswearing war forever: it's peace.
Peace created by force and the threat of pre-emption; aka mutual nuclear destruction. It was scary and very risky, but it worked. Just as our gambit in Iraq is risky, Iraq could vote for a theocracy, but that was its path if we did nothing. After Saddam's eventual death and tribal/civil war there would have been no mediating factor, Iraq would have become a puppet of Iran and the Mullahs. They have a shot and early indications are that they intend to use it to create their own form of representational government. Not a clone of ours, but not a theocracy either.
Perhaps Johnson's belief in the Domino Theory , also called the Domino Effect, theory in U.S. foreign policy after World War II stating that the “fall” of a noncommunist state to communism would precipitate the fall of noncommunist governments in neighbouring states, wasn't so wrongheaded after all.
Radical Islam and China is the current and next foe, are we going to live under their law or ours? Their economic system or ours? That is the choice we made March 19, 2003, Iraq is our line in the sand, literally and rhetorically.
China watches and waits.
Posted by feste at October 23, 2004 02:08 PM | TrackBack