Thread by @davereaboi

I’m not surprised to see this—and I’m definitely not surprised to see the author—but it’s still disappointing. nationalreview.com/corner/iraq-wa…

French justifies the Iraq War by reiterating all the reasons why Hussein was bad. I’m not sure many disagree, but his points are straight from 2003, and remind me precisely of the pre-Libya War catalogue of Qaddafi horribles.

Yes, yes, all true. Let’s stipulate that he’s correct about Hussein’s evil (and for that matter, Qadaffi’s similar evil). Ok, that’s an argument for why Iraq was an enemy to be countered, not necessarily a justification for war that would have many unintended consequences.

Disappointed to see that French didn’t tackle with the biggest one of these consequences, the empowering of Iran, not just in the region but inside Iraq also.

I’m not sure how war planners could disregard the religious makeup of the country (minority Sunni ruling over majority Shia). Did they think sectarian strife would disappear from *Iraq* of all places?

I’ll take ownership of my support for the Iraq War at the time. I was young and, frankly, not astute enough to be skeptical of our bipartisan elites’ inability to plan or win the war. It gave us a renewed anti-war movement and (starting in 2005) radicalized the Democratic Party.

If the only metric is domestic social cohesion—and, frankly, there are not very many more meaningful metric—the Iraq War was a disaster.

Bush went into the war thinking it was America of the 1950s, and didn’t plan for the media and Dems to use the war to pull the country apart.

With the Iraq War, Bush gave the Left the matches, and let them have the barn pretty much to themselves.

Considering where we are now, politically, I’m really shocked that people can say it was still worth it.

Another point: we can blame Obama for a too-hasty withdrawal, and that’s true. But awareness of political reality in a democracy means that these things just cannot be allowed go on too long, or else the next guy will fuck it up. They should have known that; Angelo Codevilla did.

I really learned so much from going back with @JordanSchachtel through the Weekly Standard Libya archives. The facile arguments for that intervention—ignoring all possible consequences or super predictable regional fall-out, etc—we should set a higher standard. Ehem.

I’m not saying interventions are always wrong or dumb or immoral or unjust. But they’re serious—a lot more serious than the typical Pom-Pom waving would lead you to believe.