Via Andrew Sullivan, an Intellectual Conservative asks many questions of the Iraq Warriors;
Does victory mean toppling Saddam? Done. Does victory mean ensuring Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction? Done. Does it mean a stable and Western style democracy in Iraq? Good luck with that. Does it just mean a stable but perhaps not democratic Iraq? Good luck with that as well. Does it mean modernizing and westernizing all of the Middle East? Does it mean stamping out all vestiges of "Shari'a-observant Islam" or more crudely put, wiping out "Islamo-fascism." Most War on Terror supporters I have talked to cannot give a coherent answer.Of course they can't give a coherent answer. Their thinking up till this point has been totally incoherent. It's all fuzzy and feel good. It's not about setting clear and goals that are possibly attainable. The Iraq was wasn't about Saddam (cause sure he was a mass murderer and jerk and he wanted to kill GHW Bush, but there are lots of mass-murdering jerks who want to kill our presidents). It wasn't about the threat of WMDs falling into terrorists's hands (cause if it were then the Bush administration would be better-funding Nunn-Lugar stuff.) This crusade won't be victorious until the whole world is a democracy. And therefore, the crusade will never end.
And it's just plain nuts.
Of course we should care about human rights, and of course democracy is a better form of government than the others, but agreement with those principles doesn't necessitate that we go to war with every damn place that is different from our own. We have a finite amount of resources - money and soldiers - and we need to figure out how to best allocate it. This way doesn't seem to be working too well... so maybe we should stop it.
[Andrew Sullivan]
[Intellectual Conservative]
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