Andrew Sullivan and the Atrophy of Logic

According to Andrew Sullivan's Blog, we had to invade Iraq because (a) they had a lot of immoral people who would have worked with the jihadists if it suited them and (b) everybody agreed. We must stay the course because(c) if we leave, the jihadists will have a base from which to operate.

Mr. Sullivan views anyone who trusted Saddam and his sons as naive. I guess I'm naive in not worrying that Mr. Sullivan would, if it suited his purposes, combine forces with the dictators of Myanmar to overthrow American democracy. Actually, I don't lose any sleep over this prospect, not because I have any great faith in Mr. Sullivan, since I don't know him from Adam, but because I can't conceive of the situation where aligning with Myanmar would suit his purposes. So, naive fool that I am, I sleep well at night.

Perhaps I was similarly naive about Saddam and his crowd, but since Bin Laden appears to be a religious fanatic and Saddam's sons were dissolute playboys, the common cause which they might have made seems pretty hard to discern. And, of course, there isn't the slightest evidence that they ever tried.

It's not technically true that everyone thought we needed to invade Iraq eventually. Most Europeans did not, and in particular the people who were in Iraq looking industriously for WMDs and finding none, thought it might be a good idea to develop at least an iota of concrete evidence first.

However, it may be true that almost the entirety of the American political establishment backed invading Iraq. This is not quite the same thing as a logical demonstration of truth. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed the U.S. Senate 98-2. However, the more telling point is that essentially all the responsible people who spoke in favor, did so because they believed the fiction of Iraqi WMDs. Nobody at the time, and no one now with any decent respect for facts, put forward stopping Al Qaeda as the reason.

Nevertheless, even if we were lied to at the outset, if today we face the prospect of an emboldened and empowered enemy, we might be forced to stay in Iraq. However, the post-US Iraq/Al Qaeda connection is only a little less tenuous than Sullivan/Mynamar.

In the first place, the Sunni arabs have just 20% of the population and a still lower percentage of the oil, which is the only valuable thing Iraq has. If somehow they manage to "win" the ensuing civil war, about the best they can hope for is 20% of the pie. If no war, they have millions of acre of stinking desert. If war, they may get a modest reward but they will exhaust themselves in the battle. In neither case is it plausible to present them as a springboard for radical Islam.

For the second point, refer to (a) above. The Baathists are secular. Al Qaeda is Wahabist. Oil and water. They may hold together to face a common enemy, but not afterwards.

Iraq is not going to be a pleasant place after the U.S. leaves. I don't want to be there. More generally, I have never wanted, and never will, want to be there. But at the end of the day, it's their problem. Our problem is that we're paying for this with money we're borrowing from the Chinese. That is an actual problem that we will someday need to confront.