At least, I don't think Hitch is. But I still adore his writing, and I'm not sorry, and I have no intention of stopping.

Via the puppyblender who brung me (today), an observation on the anniversary of the war, a series Slate entitled "How Did We Get Iraq Wrong?" (But not, of course, in an editorial way. No, no.)

Hitchens' short answer: I didn't.

I would . . . maintain that . . . incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

Read the whole thing. It's loaded to the gills with nuance.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:06 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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