WHY SHOULD WE ATTACK IRAQ?

WHY SHOULD WE ATTACK IRAQ? Steven Den Beste gives lots of reasons, including these, in a must-read essay:

The problem is that Saddam is a monster, and he is set to be followed by a son who is even worse. He has weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and despite certain claims to the contrary, we cannot be sure that he will not give, or otherwise provide, them to groups who will smuggle them into the US. I do not want 500 kilos of VX being released in downtown Atlanta. I do not want Pittsburgh getting nuked. I do not want thousands of people in Seattle dying from anthrax. And I don’t want New York to bleed anymore.

Nothing in the future is certain, but in my opinion the chance of this happening is too high if the Baath regime in Baghdad is permitted to continue to rule. So we’ll have to go take it out, and put a better (for us) regime in place. We did that in Japan, too, and it’s a damned good thing both for us and for the Japanese. Yes, we meddle in the world. It’s part of the role one takes on by being rich and strong. And it does make us hated.

Den Beste ends by saying “So what gives us the right to go attack Iraq? The right of survival, the fact that if we don’t go to Iraq to fight, there’s an unacceptably high chance that Iraq’s WMDs might come to us.”, paraphrasing, perhaps unconsciously, Trotsky’s famous phrase, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Right now, we should be very, very interested in finishing off Iraq as a threat to the world.