A Sort of Addendum to the Last Entry

I'd be much more inclined to sympathize with the anti-war position if I thought the anti-war folks properly understood or cared about the horror of the Saddam regime.

The only evidence to me that the war has been unsuccessful is the security situation. The political process and governing counsel and general openess of Iraqis to the US overthrowing Saddam all seems to be working itself out well. The effects in the greater Middle East are favorable as well, Libya and Lebannon, being the prime examples.

The security situation sucks, but it mostly sucks because in Saddam's Iraq there was not an effective police force that played by our normal rules of procedure and police work. They kept "peace" through terror. Corruption was the rule. Saddam kept the Islamicists in line through torture and threats of torture, he promoted thugs and kept everything together by a code of terror for twenty years. This is not easily dismantled.

I might be more sympathetic to the anti-war position if it were something along the lines of "it's so broken, it'll be impossible to fix." But where is the humanity in that position? Where is the liberal hope? Instead, I got the sense the anti-war position was more about anti-US agression, rather than proposing a way to dismantle and heal a terror regime. And I think that was and still is, a more important issue.

Notes: A separate issue is our treatment of prisoners, which has gotten bad press, but I don't link that specifically to Iraq, since it has occurred both with Guantanomo and Abu Gharib, and in the Florida and Texas prison systems (yet no one seems to be too up in arms about those places).

There is also the issue of the Iranian regime escalating their nuclear program as a direct result of the Iraq war. They've been tryin to do this for a long time and yes, Iraq threatens them, so it's become more of a forefront issue. This issue was coming regardless of Iraq or not, but I will grant that Iraq may had sped up the process. Same with North Korea.