2. Have you changed your position?
No, but I've probably gotten a little smugger about it.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out in the least damaging manner possible. That will probably entail splitting the country in three.
Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).
Don't put me in charge
Matt Welch
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. Nor did I oppose it.
2. Have you changed your position?
Slightly. What kept me from opposing the war outright was:
1) I thought it very likely the Saddam Hussein regime had WMDs,
and that the West would never have a mechanism for real weapons
inspections without the credible threat of military
intervention;
2) I thought there was far more international/legal justification
for bombing Iraq than there ever was for bombing Kosovo (an action
which, at the time, I supported);
3) Saddam's totalitarian reign was one whose end I would not weep
for.
In short, I supported the bluff (though not, of course, the exact way it was made), and then hoped we wouldn't call it. Which isn't very intellectually defensible, but there you go.
What has changed about my position (as opposed to the changes in presumed facts) is that I'm even more worried than I was in spring 2003 (which was a lot) that cranky interventionism (or Jacksonian Wilsonianism, as I don't like to call it), is a terrible approach to foreign policy, because it extends our resources, enlarges the target on our back, feeds into the anti-American pathology that comes when we and only we flex the only Power that matters, and leads to the corruption that inevitably accompanies an expansion of power. Which is to say, the stuff I thought might go bad has gone far worse than I feared.
All that said, I have reserved space in my brain for the possibility that in the long view, this will have turned out to be a daring and revolutionarily pro-demcratic (if hugely flawed) act.
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دردشة عراقية|10.17.11 @ 12:31PM|#
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