Derb says at The Corner: [1]
Jonah: Your argument on Iraq—basically, that, as some Secretary of State or other said, we broke it, so we oughta fix it—is nontrivial. It lacks general appeal, though, and is probably a big vote-loser.I think it quite likely that an abrupt U.S. withdrawal would be followed by some widespread violence, though I doubt it would rise to a Rwanda or Cambodia level of nastiness. There are so many groups willing to do violence to each other that the resolution, once the restraint of U.S. presence was removed, would likely be swift and Darwinian. If it was sufficiently swift, net fatalities might well be less than from another 5 years of occupation. It’s a grisly calculus, I agree, but when people are as determined to kill, cook, and eat each other as Middle East Muslims are, there is a case for letting them get on with it—our own national interests duly allowed for, of course.
Look, Derb, the question that you don’t seem to be willing to ask, much less answer, is what guarantee you have that once they’ve killed half of the people in the region, the remaining half is not going to come for the rest of us? You are attributing rationality, to people who have demonstrated themselves to be totally irrational. That seems to me was the question posed by 9/11 here in the US, and other attacks elsewhere in the world. Call it “The Neville Chamberlain question” if you like.
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Isn’t it amazing how a fund that history lesson has to be Re-taught, even among the pundits of the right?
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All of that, leaves aside the question of genocide, that I think it is inherent in all of this. Genocide, you will recall, is how we ended up in Bosnia, among other places. All through the nineties, in fact, that we as a moral interest, had to respond to genocidal attacks. Whether it was through the U.N. or whether those responses were unilateral, didn’t seem to matter much. As a result under the Clinton administration we had more in the way of military deployments, than under any other president in the history of this country.
But now that we’re involved in Iraq, and we have a republican in the White House, suddenly genocide isn’t enough of a reason for us to stay, so as to prevent such from occurring. Funny how that works. Here, it appears to me, we have yet another democrat double standard.
As for allowing for our national interests, perhaps it’s time for you to invest a weekend to investigate what would happen were the world’s oil supplies to be depleted by the amount under the disputed regions. certainly, cutting off the world’s access to that much oil would make the global warming fanatics happy, but not many others.
Simply put, until the job is completed. Anything less is unacceptable, from both the morality standpoint and from a national interest standpoint.At which point during the last four and a half years were we trying to incite Iraqis to kill Iraqis? At which point were we doing anything other than try to help them—however clumsily and sometimes wrong-headedly—to get their act together as a nation? How long do we have to struggle with such efforts before our moral responsibility can fairly be considered to have been discharged?