Hey, I just realized: not only we wouldn’t have to worry about the military capabilities of various unpleasant foreigners – that would’ve solved the illegal immigration problem as well, wouldn’t it. And even the problem with US jobs moving abroad.

Too bad for Oliver – he lives in the UK, right? Oh well, sorry, nothing personal.

fiat Tony, ruat caelum. what a hack.

Had I made such a recommendation, you would be quite right to reject it.

Let’s return to the question you posed at the outset. You already have my answer. Kamm might say (in effect but at greater length) that we had compelling reasons to invade Iraq and if we have similarly compelling reasons to bomb a minibus then we should bomb a minibus. Why should he shrink from that conclusion? The IAF frequently bombs minibuses; if Kamm condemns that then maybe you have him cornered. If not then it’s hard to see where you are going with this.

The fact that we no longer have to worry about the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein and his family – not just now but maybe thirty years into the future

I don’t think even that’s true. Maybe in the very, very narrow sense that Saddam Hussein’s literal family probably won’t return to power in Iraq (although who can tell – isn’t his daughter in Jordan somewhere?), but is it inherently unreasonable to think that, 30 years down the road, there could be a strongly anti-American and anti-Western government in Iraq that succeeds in producing nuclear weapons? That’s a good 5 years to wait out a US withdrawal, 15 years to win the civil war, and 10 years to come up with the nukes.

“The terrible death of anti-Israel activist Rachel Corrie beneath an Israeli bulldozer was plainly an accident – an impassioned demonstration that got out of hand – and no fair-minded observer would doubt the thoroughness and fairness of the Israeli army’s investigation. But that won’t stop unfair-minded observers from using Miss Corrie’s memory as a tabula rasa on which to write their own myths.”

By Kamm’s logic (term is loosely used), we would be justified in killing any neighbor we didn’t like the look of, just in the off chance he would have happened to become a murderer.

What Bush has been successful at is making the US even more hated by its enemies, making many new enemies, and weakening to a great degree the relationship with its allies.

1/ We alone, unlike the ‘pro-hezbollah left’ and the intellectual heirs of Kissinger and Hurd have a moral compass which points to the true magnetic north of Decency.

2/ We alone care about the poor purple-fingered mites in Iraq yearning to breathe free.

If all Kamm can now offer is a consequentialist argument that over half a million actual Iraqi deaths are justified because they prevent x hypothetical deaths when the Hussein dynasty acquired Massive Weapons of Destruction sometime in the next thirty years, hasn’t he implicitly abandoned both those claims in favour of a Kissingerian realism which effectively says that Iraqi lives are unimportant compared to our position on the global chessboard?

Why? Because life really is too fucking short.

Especially in Iraq these days.

Guilty, if it’s at all relevant. I’ve also recently written things about Paul Auster, Mark Danielewski, Patrick Cockburn, Bernard Williams, and the history of Paris. I’m not much enamoured of your recommendation to retreat into huffy, disdainful silence in the face of an argument with which one disagrees.

Sounds like a reasonable guess. But there’s a very real danger that this “superiority” will steadily diminish as one reads more and more of his junk. Because, as bad Jim put it, “There is such a thing as negative knowledge.” The sort of superiority complex you describe can be very hazardous indeed to one’s mental health.