The Good War, After All

The stubborn insistence that the source of our problems with ISIL is invading Iraq in 2003 and getting rid of that beast Saddam and his evil spawn who would have made Saddam 2.0 even more beastly still shocks me.

We had plenty of reasons long before George W. Bush arrived to defeat and destroy the Saddam regime.

And the alternative of leaving Saddam in power should be self-evidently bad.

And in that post I forgot to mention that the Libyans would still have a nuclear program and the Pakistani Khan nuclear export business would still be thriving. I'm sure I forgot other things, too.

Indeed, we did such a good job improving Iraq that even Iraq War opponent President Obama deemed the non-Baathist Iraqi government worthy of our direct support to defeat its ISIL enemies. Could Saddam have laid claim to that aid?

Yet many anti-war types retroactively claim that George H. W. Bush's war in 1990-1991 was the right way to fight Saddam.

And the left did not protest Bill Clinton's armed containment of Saddam.

So the progression from the left's point of view is good war from 1990-2000; bad war from 2001 (when support for sanctions was visibly weakening) to late 2014; and good war from late 2014 to the present.

Yes. Here we are, fighting in Iraq again. I guess it is the good war, after all.