Still OK, O.K.
Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy revisits three questions about the Iraq war that he asked back in 2004. I send him back to my original response. I might make a few minor changes today, but I think it still pretty much holds up.
posted by LAGuy @ 2:31 AM
2 Comments:
At what point of ongoing American involvement and daily casualties of both Americans and Iraqis would you change your view that it has been worth it, if any? Although the reasons may have been reasonable at the beginning, intervention also depends on your ability to install something better. Could a point arrive at which you would question whether that is truly possible?
Certainly you should always be adapting to new information. But these are questions you ask all along the way (before the war, how many Iraqis have to die and how serious does the threat have to be before we take action). One question that can't be answered is how much worse (or better) would things have been if we didn't take action--one thing we've learned after the war is how Saddam, in essence, had allies who were waiting to get him out of the box, and how badly the situation in Iraq was deteriorating--it's quite possible (I'd say even likely) things are much better than they'd be if we hadn't gone in, but that's simply something that's impossible to feel, the same way if someone had disarmed that killer at Virginia Tech before the second part of his rampage, no one would be saying "wow, we really dodged a literal bullet."
Anyway, here's the real question to be asked (no matter how good or bad things are on the ground--and there's a lot of disagreement over that)--what can happen if we stay (which by no means implies we keep doing the same thing, though, oddly, anti-war types say it does) compared to what can happen if we leave soon. The idea that because things seem very bad that they can't be worse appears to be the working assumption of many anti-war people, and it's not a serious argument.
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