A number of liberal-left commentators are eating crow over their doomsday pronouncements over the war… okay, not as many as the Weekly Standard would like. After all, things aren’t finished yet, we still haven’t installed meaningful democracy in Iraq, much less spread it to any place else. I’m still convinced this is a war of oil-feuled geopolitics; Iraq was a regime that didn’t play by the rules and used its oil riches to militarize and threaten those rules. Chemical, bio and nuclear weapons, as well as democratic governance, mattered to the Bush administration primarily as instances of its tendency to resist containment. Some good will come out of this geopolitical war, maybe a lot of good. But a dose of skepticism is still good, as is a dose of international relativism, putting ourselves into the minds of Europeans and Arabs and East Asians and our neighbors in Canada and Latin America. Even if the left went overboard on certain predictions, these remain worthy goals. Also, I continue to resent the deception with which this war was sold. The fact that we are right now not sure whether Bush is targeting Syria or not is telling. Keeping our allies in fear of perpetual war to reshape the world in an image we’d prefer may strike some as bold foreign policy, but to others it is scary and misguided.
But for now, let’s hope that the doomsday scenarios don’t come true, that Iraq turns to peaceful democratic governance. And let’s hope that the Democrats can find a smart, consistent foreign policy message. I don’t hold much hope for that though; the coalitions that work on certain domestic issues simply encompass too broad an opinion on foreign affairs.
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