Unfortunately they are smart enough to stay home and use other people’s money to send other people to kill and to die for their dopey fantasies. They really do deserve some serious punishment; if there is a case for death penalty – that must be it.

Here’s where we imagine Dan slowly cruising around his neighbourhood in a hunt for bylaw infractions.

Basically, yes. I do not feel responsible for the existence of every bad government and bad situation on the face of the earth. You don’t have to be a bloody-minded Kissinger realist to understand that you can’t do everything everywhere.

How many more years of Ba’athist rule—followed most likely by the same chaos that we’ve seen accompanying its end, if not much worse—would it take for you to consider that cutting it short by force might just be the lesser of two evils?

Cutting Saddam’s rule short might indeed have been the lesser of two evils, but we had to take George Bush into consideration. Nobody trusted him to do anything right, and we also suspected him of having unsavory motives, and we were amply vindicated on both counts. Whereas you took the other gamble, and are going to have to spend a decade or two living that down.

A lot of the stuff you’ve been saying may have made sense at some earlier period in the progress of the war, as I hinted in #32, but you need to take events into consideration. You’re coming pretty close to turning the Iraq War, a concrete complex of real events, into a philosophical hypothetical like the runaway trolley car and the fat man.

So the horrific misery in Zimbabwe right now must be your problem too, Dan. And Myanmar. And North Korea. And on and on. Now, what are you doing to support the invasion and occupation of these countries by more enlightened forces? Or do you just shrug and say it’s not you problem?

Or maybe you think Iraq under Saddam was really in a league by itself, miles beyond Zimbabwe or Myanmar or North Korea on the hell-on-earth scale. Which would be utterly absurd, but not out of character.

Less death.

Did you think that wasn’t your problem? How many more years of Ba’athist rule—followed most likely by the same chaos that we’ve seen accompanying its end, if not much worse—would it take for you to consider that cutting it short by force might just be the lesser of two evils?

Maybe this, maybe that. How’s Osama doing?

What did you think was going to happen if Saddam wasn’t deposed? Did you think that wasn’t your problem? How many more years of Ba’athist rule—followed most likely by the same chaos that we’ve seen accompanying its end, if not much worse—would it take for you to consider that cutting it short by force might just be the lesser of two evils?

I read down the thread to see if anyone would respond to Roy Belmont’s query about whether, actually, the levelling of Iraq was in fact the neo-con / neo-imperialist plan all along and so despite their crocodile tears about how “badly” it’s all gone and how much they didn’t see it coming, if in fact they are laughing all the way to the bank / the crypts of the undead in which they sleep during the day / wherever. Because as satisfying as it would be to say that they are all morons, they aren’t—GWB is, sure, but lots of them aren’t. They might actually be wicked and they might actually be glad about the outcome. Are they hurting? Not at all. Who’s hurting: Iraqis, lower-class Americans. That’s it.

All of which was discussed at the time.

You damned—and I mean that in the religious sense—idiot. What did you think was going to happen after Saddam was deposed? Did you think it wasn’t your problem?

Your plan to drive 90 miles an hour through a school zone was a spectacular and surprisingly inexpensive success. Your subsequent attempt to avoid killing school children by running them over, on the other hand, had multiple worthy but extremely difficult and completely open-ended goals, given the foreseeable results of driving 90 miles an hour through a school zone. Prosecuting you for multiple counts of manslaughter would be completely unfair . . .

One thing you need to understand here is that the bad guys are not to be judged on the utilitarian grounds; the Baath party, the Cuban government, the Soviets, the Hamas, you name it – their utilitarian achievements are to be immediately dismissed with scorn and ridicule. They are to be judged by their crimes and moral failing.

It’s the goods guys of this world – the Pinochets, the Chiang Kai-sheks, the Sharons, the Bushies – their crimes and moral failing are completely irrelevant in view of their (allegedly) tremendous utilitarian achievements.

The New York Times explains it all for you. See, you should mistrust what you hear about Iraqi public opinion, because you can’t trust them to really speak freely, unless they’re telling you that they want the American occupation to continue, in which case they’re obviously speaking with “candor.”

Something like 10% of Iraqis are in exile. More are in internal exile. Large areas have been ethnically cleansed, or are ruled by religious militias. Many normal functions of life (education, medicine, electricity) are less-fulfilled than under Saddam, too a large degree because of poor security (e.g. MDs in exile).

Security is worse than under Saddam. But if you compete against your own worst performance, you always win.

The obvious question would be whether anyone knew what was about to happen and had a plan to avoid this that—we all can now suspect—might have worked. Anyone?