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Jan Haugland has eloquently flamed the left. With justice, I think.
We have boxed ourselves into an impossible ethical position. Because the hopes for defeating Bush have been linked so directly and stridently to the "quagmire," for the left the war must continue to be a quagmire. It can't have escaped many people's notice that the capture of Saddam Hussein followed close on the heels of an uncharacteristically fiery speech by Al Gore. The Q-word was used.
Any sign of things turning out well is a boon for Bush, according to a stark and unsavory political equation. For an antiwar position to remain viable, the situation in Iraq now and in the future has to be so bad that the previous status quo looks better by contrast. We become trapped in the position of implicitly favoring the old regime and hoping that life becomes worse and worse for Iraqis.
There's thus no basis for welcoming what happened over the weekend. Since it was wrong to overthrow Saddam in the first place, we must believe it would be better for him to still be in power. And after all, deep down he's a human being like the rest of us, right? We should empathize! Of course, the same could be said about Pinochet, but don't expect anyone on the left to point that out.
What a mess. And there are at least a couple of questionable assumptions underlying it.
One is that if the Iraq war turns out for the better, it will necessarily result in a new era of aggressive militarism. This is fortune telling. People quickly get tired of wars, especially ones they had qualms about all along. Bush's war has been costly and traumatic. If Americans were nurturing fantasies about easily won wars – fantasies stoked by the "casualty-free" wars of the 80s and 90s – then they have been disillusioned. Which is good. There's actually no such thing as a casualty-free war. Grenada and Panama were propaganda exercises. Soldiers' lives were saved in Kosovo by increasing the risk to civilians; Iraq is son-of-Kosovo. The Clinton administration may have inadvertently fed the allure of war, and the Bush administration may have inadvertently dampened it.
Then there's the reverse assumption: that setbacks in Iraq, although of course tragic, may at least have the benefit of demonstrating the folly of Bush's ways, triggering a massive turn in the direction of isolationism (sometimes disguised with reference to the UN as deus ex machina) and social progressivism. I doubt it. That's not what happened post-Vietnam, anyway. We had one Democratic president in the wake of Vietnam and he was hounded into defeat by the growing sense of national malaise and international weakness. The long term political outcome of failure in Vietnam was the election of Ronald Reagan.
Things don't work in a simple linear way. A better outcome to the war doesn't necessarily mean more war, and a worse outcome doesn't necessarily mean peace.
I want to see Bush and his cronies go. But there are limits to our control over the democratic process, and when we place "get Bush" above all other issues, we slip into the worst kind of ideology-driven fanaticism and end up sabotaging ourselves.
It's what happened to the other side a few years ago, and now it's our turn. And ultimately it's worse for us because no one expects the right to be fair and balanced.
2:51:57 PM 
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