No Regrets
Tony Blair is defending his decision to support the invasion of Iraq. As readers of this blog know, I think it was the right decision. (That he did it knowing it was unpopular only makes the call more brave. This doesn't stop many of his opponents from pretending he took the easy way out.)
War is costly, but I do believe if Blair and others hadn't taken out Saddam Hussein (and put Iraq on the road to democracy) the world would be in a much worse place than it is now. And I think the benefits--much of which amount to things being bad rather than considerably worse (that's how it works when you deal with a place where there are no happy solutions)--should continue for decades to come. Alas, I don't think Europe will ever come around; ironically, if nothing had been done, I think Europe would have changed its mind. But because we dealt with the situation when we should have (okay, maybe too late), it's easy for opponents to believe it was the wrong thing to do.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
1 Comments:
Couldn't agree more. And what is annoying is opponents of the Iraq action fixate on the mistaken belief that Saddam was stockpiling WMDs. They do this because it rankles them that it was this possibility (that everyone ackowledged at the time) that won public and Congressional support for the policy (from John Kerry to Hillary Clinton). They perhaps rightfully suspect that without that element of the argument for invasion, it would have been much more difficult for George Bush and Blair to build their coalition of the willing.
But the fact is, Bush and Blair and most of the Congress recognized many other reasons that argued for the removal of Saddam's regime. Heck, removal of Saddam had been official policy of the Clinton adminsitration before George Bush. The Bathist regime was dangerous and destabilizing (and evil to boot) whether or not they then had WMDs. There flagrant violations of the terms of the 1991 Armistace were justification enough to warrant Saddam's ouster. Tactical considerations w/r/t Iran and Syria also argued strongly for action to be taken. And if the regime didn't then currently have WMDs, they certainly had had them before, and given the attitude expressed toward their defeat in the first gulf war, certainly would seek them again.
But the left is really pissed off they lost this argument to what turned out to be a false plank. But I don't see how anyone familiar with politics can truly suggest that Bush and Blair are somehow criminally liable for pushing every argument in their arsenal to defend a decision they believed was necessary. Short of a conspiracy to create an argument out of whole cloth (which the WMD threat was not), both sides always push their arguments as far as they can, and the WMD argument had a lot of traction for the proponents of regime change in Iraq.
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