July 22, 2003

Why Are We in Iraq: A Primer

Stephen Den Beste, this medium's master of the Long Form, has written what is currently the finest review of the reasons we are in Iraq, and how they fit into the War on Terrorism. His essay / outline on Iraq, Yellowcake, Liberals, Lies and Terrorism is now, for those who care, required reading. Excerpts cannot do it justice, but....

There has never been any big mystery about the overall scope of the war, the kinds of things which would have to be accomplished over decades before it would end, or the kinds of things we'd have to do in order to win it. Long time readers will recognize that the above outline is a summary of things I've been writing about ever since the attack in September of 2001, and I'm not the only one. The only people who haven't known about this big picture are those who've been in denial all this time about just how big a problem we face.

Those who are claiming that the issue of Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction was the one-and-only reason why we went to war in Iraq, and that the claim about uranium from Niger was the one-and-only piece of evidence used to justify it, are engaging in historical revisionism which approaches hallucination. But it's hardly surprising that they're hallucinating about this, because they also hallucinated 2 million Iraqi refugees, hundreds of thousand of Iraqi civilians killed when we carpet-bombed all the major cities, a huge uprising of the "Arab Street", a vast and palpable increase in terrorist attacks all over the world and especially against the US, and a military quagmire in Iraq including weeks of bloody street fighting in Baghdad which would result in thousands of American and British dead, and ultimately to ignominious retreat. The reason they're concentrating on this issue now is that they have no other, and in the long run it's actually going to increase their political marginalization. It's a sorry statement about them that they can find nothing else to discuss.

Posted by Vanderleun at July 22, 2003 10:46 AM
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