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March 18, 2006

It's Never Too Late to Admit You Were Wrong or Crow About Being Right!

Reason has a pretty good survey article polling some paleo-con, libertarian, and independent intellectuals about their views on the Iraq war three years after its start. Some names? Christopher Hitchens, Wendy McElroy, Tom Palmer, David Friedman, Tim Cavanaugh, Charles Murray, William A. Niskanen and some others of equal stature.

My two cents:

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, I always opposed this war. I said at the time that invading and occupying Iraq would turn the country into a California-sized jumbo version of the (pre-Israeli withdrawal) Gaza strip. And it seems I was right.

2. Have you changed your position?
Yes. I am even more opposed to this aggressive act of racism and revenge than I was originally. But who could foresee that the Bush administration would be a “perfect storm-style” combination of incompetence, hubris, arrogance and bad luck.

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get the fook out ASAP! Iraq will prolly devolve into a three autonomous or even wholly independent nation-states though. But then these regions always were separate entities held together by force anyway.

Just as in the (former) nation-state of Yugoslavia, Iraq is a political construct that was cobbled together in the foreign ministries of Europe in the early 20th century and is made up of disparate and distinct ethnic and religious groups: Shia and Sunni Muslim Arabs, and the Kurds.

These groups have no real sense of national identity and would likely have gone their separate ways a long time ago were it not for the iron rule of Saddam holding them together with force. With Saddam’s iron fist removed they would naturally tend to go their separate ways. (Just as Yugoslavia’s ethnic and religious groupings did after the USSR and Marshall Tito both died.)

Posted by Ali Massoud at March 18, 2006 02:06 PM

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