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August 26, 2005
For The Wobblies On Iraq
RDS at The Ten O'Clock Scholar has an in depth analysis of why we fight in Iraq.
First, let's review the "mistakes" of the war. There was a plan for the postwar, namely that certain exiles would quickly take power being welcomed by the people. Events however turned out to make that plan worthless, as the exiles had no clout, so a new plan for the postwar had to be improvised. Also, no large WMD stockpiles were found, which is (incorrectly) given as the only "justification" for the war. These two facts are taken to make the whole effort a "failure."
It turns out, however, that many things happened to work in our favor as a consequence of the war that we even had no idea about -- they were the "unknown unknowns", as Rummy would say.
"Unknown unknowns..." What a typical on-the-mark Rumsfeldism: the phrase speaks to the corrosive confidence of hindsight; and to the extent to which intellectually lazy (or malicious) people accept without question conclusions based on hindsight.
That phrase also points to the impossibility of proving a negative. France had the largest army in Europe in 1934, yet France allowed a vastly inferior Wehrmacht to occupy the Rhineland--if France had acted, WWII would have been prevented. But at that time, the historical judgment of Hitler had not been registered; the 60 million killed in the war were still alive. There were a lot more defenders of Hitler in 1936 than there were of Saddam in 2003 (Lindberg and John Kennedy's dad, for starters).
Picture yourself as a citizen of the Allies in 1936, and contemplate sending the French army to oust the Germans--the scope of destruction of WWII is hard to imagine from our current standpoint. It would have been utterly inconceivable to anyone living in 1934. Yet it could easily have been avoided if only the French had acted.
So we will never know what would have happened had not Saddam been ousted. But RDS meticulously lays out the reasons for, and results of, our calling "enough!" to appeasement.
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