Thursday, February 27, 2003

Matthew Yglesias has a post up that attempts to explain why he thinks it is still necessary to go after Iraq even considering the fact that the Bush administration has pretty much bungled the lead-up to war.
With all this said, I agree with Ken Pollock that it probably would've been better if the administration hadn't started taking us down this road at all. Regime change needed to happen within the next few years, but perhaps we could have found a more opportune time. That said, if we back down now that's going to make it all-but-impossible to try this again in a couple of years. In addition, it'll make using pure deterrence against Saddam that much harder, since he'll see himself as having "deterred" a US invasion without even acquiring nuclear weapons. So having come this far, I think we still need to do it.
All of this is true. But I still can't get around the fact that it is Bush that is in charge of this effort and that he is such a monumental screwup that, in the balance, a world in which Saddam is allowed to continue to rule in Iraq is better than a world in which Dubya leads the charge to remove him from power. There is no option right now available to us that does not suck. The best we can hope for is to go with the one that sucks the least and, for me, that means no war on Iraq while Bush is in charge. (All of this, of course, with the caveat that external events might change my current thinking on this matter).

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home