Jay Reding has an excellent post.
In the comments section, a Lefty whiner named Devin asks:
If the humanitarian disaster in Iraq was such a pressing concern, why did Bush wait until more than two years after he took office to do anything about it?
My response:
Like most Lefties, Devin conveniently ignores September 11th, which changed the strategic picture for the U.S. indefinitely. Clearly, containment of terrorists and the regimes that support them (and there's no serious doubt that Saddam supported terrorists -- Abu Abbas, Zarqawi, and the 1993 WTC bombers were examples of global terrorists who were given protection by Saddam) would no longer work. In an era in which WMD are increasingly available, we cannot suffer to allow thuggish, murderous, kleptocratic dictators like Saddam to continue to thrive.
Moreover, Saddam's brutalization of his own people was turning the entire country into a miasma of sociopathy. This is essentially what David Kay concluded -- that the very deterioration of the social fabric in Iraq, combined with the increasing black markets in WMD, the free-flow of terrorists through the country, and the fact that Saddam was gradually seeking to burnish his Islamist credentials all made Iraq a much more dangerous place than we had anticipated. The very fact that Saddam had driven people like those thugs in Fallujah to such levels of inhuman depravity speaks volumes for what we would have been dealing with had we been forced to confront Saddam on his terms, sometime down the road.
And there is no doubt that we would have eventually had to confront Saddam on his own terms. This is where ninnies like Devin fall off the face of reality -- they offer no alternative to deposing Saddam and trying to build some modicum of civic life in Iraq. What were the options? Well, besides liberation there were only two: continue the sanctions indefinitely, leading to greater misery for the Iraqi people and greater danger that Iraqi society would become another failed state (think Afghanistan to the power of ten); or simply end the sanctions, call things off, and allow Saddam to enrich himself and rebuild his military and WMD capability, eventually threatening us and the region.
When viewing these options, then only viable one becomes clear: Take on Saddam now, while we can still do it on our terms and Iraqi society still has some chance of being rebuilt. This clearly has collateral strategic benefits, as well, which no doubt played a role in the decision to go to war:
- It allowed us to withdraw from Saudi Arabia without seeming to appease bin Laden;
- It showed the other dictators in the region that we are no longer going to accept business as usual. Khaddafi learned this, and gave up his WMD programs.
- The dismantling of Khaddafi's WMD programs has had additional collateral benefits, as it blew the lid off of a global nuclear proliferation ring that would have become a huge threat had it continued much longer;
- We have given hope to reformers and democracy activists in the region, such as in Iran and Syria;
- Finally (and this list is by no means exhaustive), the spurring of reform in the region is the best long-term protection against terrorism, because people living in free societies tend to focus their energies inward, on their own institutions and on their own struggles to better themselves.
The Lefties are well aware of all of these points, but they pretend not to understand, or they resort to jingoistic taunts such as, "So, the war is just one big humanitarian exercise?"
Seriously, you can't talk to these people without getting a major headache...
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