One of Ours

At least there's no question about the flavor of the week. It's a scoop of regime-change second-thoughts, with a dash of "who lost Iraq by gaining it?"...

... we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on?...by making it impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup, the United States also signaled that it would not wish to rule through military proxies (incidentally, this is yet another gross failure of any analogy to Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, and all the rest of it)...

...I still recommend Kenneth Pollack's book Threatening Stormthe best general volume here. Published well before the war and by a member of the Clinton NSC whose pre-Kuwait warnings had been overruled by the first Bush administration, it openly said that continuing coexistence with Saddam Hussein had become impossible and that the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001...More than any other presentation, this prepared the ground for the intervention...

...The thing that I most underestimated is...the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends (call them Shiite and Sunni if you want a euphemism that insults the majority), was worse than I had guessed.

And this is also why I partly think that Colin Powell, as reported by Woodward, was right. He apparently asked the president if he was willing to assume, or to accept, responsibility for the Iraqi state and society. The only possible answer, morally and politically, would have been "yes." The United States had already made itself co-responsible for Iraqi life, first by imposing the sanctions, second by imposing the no-fly zones, and third by co-existing with the regime. (Three more factors, by the way, that make the Vietnam comparison utterly meaningless.) This half-slave/half-free compromise could not long have endured...

The antiwar Left used to demand the lifting of sanctions without conditions, which would only have gratified Saddam Hussein and his sons and allowed them to rearm. The supposed neutrals, such as Russia and France and the United Nations, were acting as knowing profiteers in a disgusting oil-for-bribes program that has now been widely exposed. The regime-change forces said, in effect: Lift the sanctions and remove the regime. But in the wasted decade of sanctions-plus-Saddam, a whole paranoid and wretched fundamentalist underclass was created and exploited by the increasingly Islamist propaganda of the Baath Party. This also helps explain the many overlooked convergences between the supposedly "secular" Baathists and the forces of jihad...

...they ignore the many pleas from disputed and distraught towns, from Iraqis who beg not to be abandoned to these sadistic and corrupt riffraff. One might have seen this coming with greater prescience. But it would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions. There was no way around our adoption of Iraq, as there still is not. It's only a pity that the decision to intervene was left until so many years had been consumed by the locust.