Continuing Questions

Good article by Michael Kelly on the continuing questions of the war. Here we are at victory in the military struggle, where few on either side of this issue doubted we'd be. And now we need to decide what victory means. What victory will look like for us and for the Iraqi People.

What is an honest opponent of a war supposed to do? Since even the end of this war won’t settle most of the important arguments about it, dropping all opposition at the beginning of the war would surely be more intellectually suspicious than maintaining your doubts while sincerely hoping for victory. Inevitably, more than one supporter of this war has taunted its opponents with Orwell’s famous observation in 1942 that pacifists—the few who opposed a military response to Hitler—were “objectively pro-fascist.” The suggestion is that opposing this war makes you objectively pro-Saddam. In an oddly less famous passage two years later, Orwell recanted that “objectively” formula and called it “dishonest.” Which it is.

The psychological challenge of opposing a war like this after it has started isn’t supporting the American troops, but hoping to be proven wrong. That, though, is the burden of pessimism on all subjects. As a skeptic, at the least, about Gulf War II, I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn’t happened yet.

In other news there was a positive article at MSNBC discussing Iraqis and US starting to do Joint patrols to get a handle on the looting, and a scary article underlining that Syria is probably next on the chopping block.