MidEast Report

SECOND THOUGHTS? NOT REALLY
Christopher Hitchens on what he got wrong on Iraq:

"The thing that I most underestimated is the thing that least undermines the case. And it's not something that I overlooked, either. But the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends (call them Shiite and Sunni if you want a euphemism that insults the majority), was worse than I had guessed.

...When fools say that the occupation has "united" Sunni and Shiite, they flatter the alliance between the proxies of the Iranian mullahs and the Saudi princes. And they ignore the many pleas from disputed and distraught towns, from Iraqis who beg not to be abandoned to these sadistic and corrupt riffraff. One might have seen this coming with greater prescience. But it would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions. There was no way around our adoption of Iraq, as there still is not."

Here's an essay by the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, published in March 2003. It remains, in my opinion, the most concise and elegant defense of the war against Saddam published anywhere:

"I aim to avoid double standards in thinking about the world. I thus aim to use the same criteria in assessing the arrogance of all great powers, not just the Bush administration.

I remember my nation’s experience with totalitarian dictatorship. This is why I was able to draw the right conclusions from Sept. 11, 2001. Just as the murder of Giacomo Matteotti [leader of Italy’s United Socialist Party] revealed the nature of Italian fascism and Mussolini’s regime; just as the great Moscow trials showed the world the essence of the Stalinist system; just as “Kristallnacht” exposed the hidden truth of Hitler’s Nazism, watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge. Violence, fanaticism, and lies were challenging democratic values.

This is not the place to analyze the ideology that, while disfiguring the religion of Islam, creates a crusade against the democratic world. Saddam Hussein takes part in this just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. He asserts that in the holy war with the “godless West” all methods are permitted. Waiting for this sort of regime to obtain weapons of mass destruction would be plain recklessness."

posted by Matt Duss @ 1:11 PM