Gil: How marvelous that an appeasement-minded critic of Bush would reduce the concept of “more dangerous” or “less dangerous” to a crude calculus of money and lives! As Brian’s reference to the Captain’s Quarters points out, if the absolute objective is to save money and preserve lives, the better option in war will always be to surrender. Relatively few lives were lost and little money spent on defense in France between the occupation of Paris and the invasion of Normandy, but that last year of the war was costly and deadly. Does that imply that we should simply have left well enough alone on the Continent? No, because wars are fought for lasting principles, freedoms, a way of life – not tallied and scored in terms of money and bodies.
In essence, your policy of appeasement says, “Don’t anger them, don’t oppose them; just give them what they want and nobody will get hurt.” But history proves otherwise. Show your enemy that aggression promises low-cost rewards, and they’ll invest in more of it. Show Saddam (who, as Another Matt has catalogued, had plenty of ties to al Qaeda and to terror sponsorship generally) that defying (or bribing and corrupting) the UN, rebuilding his weapons capacity, exporting terror, stealing billions meant for food and medicine, and brutalizing his own people would increase his wealth and power, and he’ll do more of the same – and it will eventually reach us in a far more expansive and dangerous form.
So, at what point do we step in? Do we let Israel go, like the Sudetenland? Do we worry about the Kurds, or Turkey, or another Kuwait, or do we wait until Baathism starts to show up west of the Hellespont, perhaps in the politcally volatile and religiously restive region of the Balkans? If we believe that a Saddam would never ally with Shiite fundamentalists, do we worry about an ascendant Saddam allying with Arab states that do have Sunni majorities?
Really, you’re arguing not that invading Iraq made the world more dangerous, but rather that it provoked a conflict too soon, before things came to a truly critical state. The result is that you’re able to point to bodies and dollars now and call them facts, coupling them with the absurd fantasy that these quantities would all be zero, permanently had we not gone to war. You entirely ignore how much more costly it would become to defend the principles we fight for had we waited until the war came to us – which it was bound to, as long as we kept living as a free, democratic, productive people.
Yes, we took the war to them, and forced them to fight and kill us and cost us money before they might have otherwise, but by invoking static analysis you only prove a truism: that fewer people died before the war started than after. That says nothing about the cost of the war we would have had to fight as an alternative, and which the delusion of appeasement imagines would never have become necessary at all. If we really wanted to save lives and money, we could have surrendered right after 9/11: simply said, “Okay, we give up! We’ll stop being to rich and free and democratic and Christian and Jewish and feminist and educated and tolerant!” Is that what we should do now?
