Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column today (4/14/09) is about how the new George W. Bush Policy Institute should focus primarily on Bush’s managerial errors:
Conventional wisdom holds that the bungling of the Iraq war was a consequence of ideology run amok. Maybe. But it was also an example of awful management. Whether you supported the war or opposed it, you have to concede that it should have ended years ago and, along with the invasion of Grenada, be a fit dissertation subject for a desperate PhD candidate and not, as it remains, a festering debacle.
I don’t follow the logic. First of all, if one opposed the war, then one actually doesn’t “have to concede” that it should have been a quick war. Some war opponents (you know, the people Cohen maligned—”only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman” could argue with Colin Powell’s WMD presentation, he wrote) were against the invasion precisely because they thought it wouldn’t work, and would lead to a bloody occupation.If people like Cohen had spent more time listening to the war’s critics—and less time insulting them—he might be less inclined to conclude that George Bush was mostly an inept manager.
What if somehow “Mission Accomplished” hadn’t been baldfaced propaganda? Would that have made any difference morally?
We’d be talking about a number far less than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that have died, that’s true.
But the war still would be just as immoral and illegal, wouldn’t it?
I don’t oppose this war, or any other, because it “won’t work”. That seems to be the standard line on Afghanistan for many in the “anti-war movement” these days … that and “blowback”.
War is war. Dead is dead. If you can’t get your supposed humanity around that concept, resign from the species.