Three years later

Johann Hari, a leftist honest enough to admit that totalitarian dictatorship might actually be worse than living under American occupation (a rare breed, these days) now says he should not have supported the war, and that occupying forces should be withdrawn at once. Many of his arguments are debatable (you'll know them when you see them) but unfortunately, it's hard to argue this point:

A few weeks ago, a small moment – a little line of text – underlined for me how far life in Iraq has slumped. As I was reading a story, the ticker-tape on the BBC News website casually stated: ‘Car bomb in Baghdad; 50 dead.’ There were no accompanying details. When these Iraqi suicide-massacres started to happen in Iraq, I would nervously call my friends out in Baghdad and Basra and Hilla to make sure they were okay. But I soon realised this was antagonising them, driving every bomb further into their skulls – should they store a standard text ‘No, not killed in suicide bomb today’ message and send it out three times a day? So I swallowed hard, waited, and the next day, I looked through all the newspapers for details. Nobody mentioned it. Suicide-slaughters the size of 7/7 are now so common they don’t even bleed into News in Brief. [emphasis added]

Watching what has happened to Iraq since the ouster of Saddam has been, for those of us who supported it, absolutely agonizing to watch. And yet, in a postscript to his column, Hari notes that most of the e-mails he's recieved from Iraqis have been along these lines:

"Your article in the Independent today, 20/3/2006, was really disappointing to all of your admirers. You let them down. You changed your mind and switched from pro-war to join the anti-war campaigners, means that you gave in bowed to the aggressors. So instead of blaming the terrorists for this mass killing in Iraq at the hand of the terrorists, you put the blame on Bush and Blair for liberating Iraqi people from the worst dictator in history. If your new stance is right, then it was wrong to stand up against Hitler in the WW II, because that war caused humanity 55 million casualties. So it was better not oppose the Axis sates. Is that fair? Is this is the justice that we are looking for? If the tyrants were left to do as they like because of the possible revenge from their followers, then our glob will be place for the tyrants only and the whole planet population will be living like sheep.

Abdulkhaliq Hussein"

Something had to be done about Saddam Hussein, and the United Nations certainly wasn't going to do anything about it besides administering a porous, much-maligned sanctions regime. (One genuinely positive side effect of the war is that we now know the degree to which the UN "oil for food" program was corrupted, and how many officials and governments were on the take all along.) I certainly won't apologize for supporting his removal, but it's gone from being merely hard to almost impossible to see how this is going to end well.

If the Americans withdraw, the message is clear: just as Hezbollah drove the Americans from Lebanon in 1983, the jihadists drove the most powerful army in the world from Iraq in 2006. The impact on Islamofascist killers' morale would be almost impossible to calculate. But Americans' will to stay in Iraq is dissipating by the day, and it seems like only a matter of time before the Bush Administration is forced to declare victory and get out.

What happens then is anybody's guess. But before long, "progressives" gloating about the humiliation of Chimpy McLikudburton's Amerikkka are going to deeply, deeply regret getting what they wished for.

Posted by damian at March 20, 2006 03:47 PM | TrackBack