Iraq: Worth the Price

The Washington Post ^ | March 11, 2008 | Christopher Hitchens

[Puzzleman]

-- snip --

And that assumption (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that our engagement with Iraq was somehow "a war of choice" -- to use a favorite catchphrase from a few years ago -- and thus that all of its costs, ranging from the physical damage to Iraqi infrastructure to the moral damage to our warriors, could have been avoided by abstention.

I don't know anybody who knows anything about the subject who believes anything so frivolous...

[Puzzleman]

It's a pleasure to see Christopher Hitchens put his brilliant intellect in our service for a change.

[rlmorel]

That old Stalinist Hitchens has got it right on at least one thing: Iraq.

I never had much truck with him until I heard him absolutely demolish and humiliate George Galloway in a debate about Iraq.

Not that demolishing Galloway is that much of a challenge (how hard can it be to humiliate someone who dresses in tights and allows himself to crawl on all fours pretending to be a cat...no...never mind...) but in front of a universally liberal audience, the smackdown was priceless...

[bt_dooftlook]

Please read his devastating critique of the Clintons, “No One Left To Lie To.” He is that rara avis, an honorable liberal. I might add that he seems increasingly at odds with the perpetual adolescence of his former confreres and so seems to be sliding to the right (as the left goes further left)

[Gene Eric]

As long as someone can point him in the right direction, we’re all good.

[denydenydeny]

Innocent as they are on the above points, they become positively childlike as they go on. Think how many candy-canes and vacations I could have if it were not for the space program, or the cost of carrier-groups or special forces or -- I don't know -- Black Hawk helicopters. (If you think I am being unkind or frivolous, see if you can detect the thread of reasoning that connects Iraq expenditures with the crisis in the mortgage system.) There are days when I think that the money raised by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might have been better spent on the alleviation of poverty, but I can still tell an apple from an orange and am not hopelessly stuck on the zero-sum fixation. Once again, the economic "experts" turn out to know the price of some things but not the value of anything.

A great paragraph.

[jeddavis]

KOSOVO was a “War of Choice”....

[Verginius Rufus]

Hitchens wrote an excellent book on the Clintons near the end of Bill's Presidency called No One Left to Lie To.

[Tallguy]

Once again, the economic "experts" turn out to know the price of some things but not the value of anything.

Oooooh! That's gonna leave a mark!

[rlmorel]

"...That the costs of putting an end to this nightmare were underestimated by one side in the argument seems to me to be obviously, if trivially, true. (The opposing side has never, to my knowledge, come up with a "costing" for the continued life of the bankrupt Baathist system, and the Bilmes/Stiglitz analysis doesn't even touch the point.) Does this mean that we can only do one form of accounting? I would argue that this is not necessarily so..."

Extraordinarily well put.

Vincent Bugliosi told an anecdote in his book "Reclaiming History" about his speech to about a thousand high powered lawyers who all (85-90%) thought there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, but had never even bothered to read the "other" side which was, essentially, the Warren Report.

He attributed a phrase to an old West Virgina mountaineer...

I may make my flapjacks thin as I want, but they still all got two sides to them!"

[rlmorel]

No kidding! Keep the teeth pointed away.

[r-q-tek86]

A great paragraph.

Indeed. I hope that McCain uses this little gem everytime the dims talk about what the money could have been used for...

There are days when I think that the money raised by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might have been better spent on the alleviation of poverty...