Politics & Iraq

Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics raises several uncomfortable questions for conservatives that require answering about why we hold the position we do on Iraq.

For my part, if this were a Gore presidency, I would have made a bit more noise about the lack of WMDs and, like Tom, I would have complained a whole lot more about our initial failure to squash the terrorists in Fallujah, as well as the repeated peace overtures to Shiite junior cleric and punk, Muqtada al Sadr instead of running him down as the terrorist leader he is. I also wouldn't have been too happy with what appeared to be an undermanned war, requiring the extensions of reservists' service. So I suppose my partisanship does affect my objectivity.

But a few things to consider...people can worship freely in Iraq. People can disagree freely. People can choose to hate their government and let it be heard. Israel, one of the itchiest trigger fingers of the free nations of the world (and with good reason), has one of its most lethal threats eliminated. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and an increasingly pro-islamist Turkey now must deal with the difficulty of having a budding Arabic democracy in the midst (with the exception of Turkey) of their dictatorships.

There is no question that the world is a much safer place after the invasion of Iraq. A government known to have possessed and used WMD on its own people, which attacked three of its neighbors, with plans to attack an oil-rich fourth neighbor to the south, which violated UN resolutions and terms of the 1991 cease-fire, which murdered its civilians, and which supported, harbored and collaborated with international terror groups, is gone. Yes, the pacification is not an easy job, and rooting out terrorist insurgents in an urban setting is a whole lot more difficult than eliminating a standing military. But the larger good is already being realized by a substantially reduced international threat.

Tom's most important point, though, is that these accomplishments are mere footnotes to many Democrats who seem to feel that deposing Saddam and all of the benefits which that brings to the Iraqi people and the world were mere details compared to the more important objective of deposing Bush in favor of someone who really had no agenda beyond winning an election.

And it's downright freaky when they side with Michael Moore who believes that there is no terrorist threat, when they demonize the Patriot Act and the Attorney General who enforces it by making blatantly false claims that people's civil rights are being trounced all over America, and by being quick to excuse terror attacks as the natural and just result of American foreign policy. Politics is a fine and fun game to play, but it raises numerous character questions about the Democrats when progress is viewed solely as a function of whether the person upon whose watch it occurred was a Democrat.