But for us, it’s important to remember why we’re fighting Saddam. The answer is September 11. Those who want to find some specific evidentiary link between al Qaeda and Saddam don’t begin to fathom what war is. It is not the pursuit of one distinct goal after another, depending on the exigencies of international law or diplomacy. That’s called foreign policy. War, in contrast, is the attempt to destroy an enemy. The enemy is Islamist terrorism and its state sponsors. Strategically, the overthrow of the Saddam regime is absolutely central to this objective. It will deal another psychological blow to the reactionaries who want to ratchet Islam back a few more centuries and wage war on the free societies of the West. It will remove one huge and obvious source of weapons of mass destruction potentially available to the enemy. It will provide a military base from which to continue the war against al Qaeda and its enablers across the Middle East, specifically in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. And it will reassert the global hegemony of the United States and its Anglosphere allies. That’s why we fight. It isn’t a pre-emptive war. It’s a reactive war – against what was done to this country throughout the 1990s, culminating on that awful September day. We are fighting to honor the memory of the dead and to defeat a brutal enemy that would inflict even more carnage if they possibly could. And we fight to defend the principles of a liberal international order, principles that the United States and the United States alone has long been responsible for upholding. Our loneliness in this struggle should not therefore be a cause for concern. It is, in fact, a sign, once again, that we are on the right path.
Perfectly stated.
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