Thursday, July 03, 2003
(8:57 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
My New-Found Support for the Iraq War
First, I'd like to thank my dear friend Robb for his wonderful posts. If that's a taste of what's to come, I feel silly for jerking awake in a cold sweat last night, panicked at the thought of the horrifying mistake I had made by inviting Robb to join my blog. Now we just need to get Mike Schaefer to actually sign up and post something.
My good friend and former colleague Andrew Sullivan has finally convinced me to support the Iraq war after months of abdicating my responsibility as an American. His reasoning is impeccable, and I will quote his post in its entirety here:
"BRING THEM ON": No, I don't think it's merely rhetoric. One of the many layers of the arguments for invading Iraq focused on the difficulties of waging a serious war on terror from a distant remove. Being based in Iraq helpsus notonly because of actual bases; but because the American presence there diverts terrorist attention away from elsewhere. By confronting them directly in Iraq, we get to engage them in a military setting that plays to our strengths rather than to theirs'. Continued conflict in Iraq, in other words, needn't always be bad news. It may be a sign that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork and tackling them in the open.
It's amazing to me how many reasons there are for this war! I've delighted in all of them, and I am very pleased to see yet another one come out of the woodwork now, just when I thought they might have run out of plausible excuses reasons. The point of the war in Iraq, among other things, lodged among the many variegated "levels" of reasons, is to put our soldiers out there as easy targets for terrorists! Soldiers are hired specifically to die for their country, so there's no real injustice in putting them halfway around the world to die in a conflict that doesn't make any sense to most of them. In addition, since terrorists are notoriously lazy and unmotivated, they will likely leave the American mainland and all our allies alone due to the "sitting ducks" stationed in Iraq.
Since this idea is ridiculous and morally repugnant, it's no wonder that no one ever mentioned it as a possibility in the lead-up to the war. Well, maybe the irrelevant liberals did: they seemed to think that an American presense in Iraq would provide a huge rallying point for terrorist recruitment. Now that it turns out they were apparently right, the Bush apologists are more than happy to turn this into a positive good. "Yes, we're encouraging people to become terrorists -- so we can kill them!"
It's sad: he's the smartest conservative out there, but he's still such an easy target.
