Grim portents

“we have plunged into darkness,” says Salam Pax.

Yes, we have: and it is a darkness too familiar. Just as now, after years of ever-increasing viciousness, no peace seems possible between Israelis and Palentinians, so too does no end of war seem possible in Iraq. And it has only been a few months, there: we’re ahead of schedule.

Glenn Reynolds and his cadre think this is a great thing. But the problem with flypaper is: there is an unlimited supply of flies. That we are attracting Al-Qaeda to Iraq, where they will try to kill our soldiers, is not in any serious doubt. That this will in some way prevent Al-Qaeda from killing Americans in America is a keyboard-jockey delusion. And also, to strain the metaphor, the flies don’t all stick to the paper in an orderly fashion. Sometimes while sticking they blow up innocent people, pipelines, and international bodies. Even I can’t give Bush credit for so little humanity as to imagine that encouraging Al-Qaeda to kill UN representatives and to leave Baghad substantially without drinking water was part of the grand plan.

War apologists: you are living in a dream world. Iraq was not a threat to the US until we made it one. An uncomfortably large percentage of our military might is now tied down in a police action without even an exit strategy in sight. Your favored theories of the moment—that we went in to Iraq to bring liberal democracy to the benighted Arab, and that we went into Iraq to give Al-Qaeda a target closer to home—are mutually contradictory: Iraq will never have a civil society while it’s filled with truck bombers. And you had better hope that Bush lied about the ever-elusive WMD, because if he didn’t, then we’ve just attracted Al-Qaeda to a country full of loose and unaccounted-for chemical and biological weapons. And yet you say that this war has made us more safe. I just want to know: how so?

Filed under: politics/war