More Email

Another insightful email from a reader:

In your follow-up to your original Iraq post, you write: "Had he done all that, would it still be so obviously the wrong policy?" But he didn't do that, and therefore it's not the same policy. It's the difference between a comprehensive plan (which, incidentally, should be the focus of liberals) versus a narrowly focused plan of removing Hussein, and that's a huge difference. (In fact, the latter has made the former that much more difficult in the Middle East and enormously difficult in Iraq.)

A few points on your original post: (1) Many liberals would have supported a comprehensive approach to the Middle East, even beginning with an invasion of Iraq. This explains the votes of Senators Kerry, Clinton, and many others in support of the so-called war resolution. (Come election time, they seemed to forgot that there were good reasons for their vote.) (2) Good intentions are not in and of themselves moral. (3) The Bush administration's approach to the war did damage to our democracy, to our political discourse, to our military, and to our intelligence agencies, and that price cannot be quantified. A very ugly precedent has been set, and those responsible have not been held accountable -- on the contrary, they've been promoted or honored.

Well put, and I agree with every bit of it. I was in no way intending in my previous posts to defend or excuse the Bush administration for its handling of the Iraq War. That would be to defend the indefensible. My fear, however, is that the Bush administration's deception and incompetence have soured many liberals to the very concept of international intervention and that's a shame. My hypothetical exercise was intented to strip away all the deception and incompetence so as to expose the potential merit of some the core ideas that gave rise to Bush's Iraq policy.