Wanna read a nice selection of bluster, tautology, nonsense?
Then by all means read this column by Daniel Pipes and his researcher Jonathan Schanzer about why toppling Saddam Hussein would be a walk in the park. (You or I could probably do it ourselves out in the garage with a few common implements and supplies purchasable at the local Home Depot!) The column is an apt primer on this new breed of yahoo-cons for whom Iraq has become a totem, a dogma, a logical banana peel waiting for the slow-witted to stumble on.
(Yup! Ouch, indeed.)
Don’t get me wrong: most Iraq-hawks have an easier time piecing together a logical argument. Some are even friends of mine. But this sort of talk raises a more general question. Who will mark out the terrain that will allow one to be a hawk, but not a dork, on Iraq and the war on terrorism?
The point of opposing Iraq yahoo-cons is not that Saddam deserves a break. Nor is that we shouldn’t be pushing to get inspectors back in or finding ways to get Saddam Hussein out of power. It’s simply based on the recognition that we’re almost certainly facing bigger dangers right now from those terrorist cells in Yemen, Somalia, Hamburg and (most of all maybe) Saudi Arabia. And we probably can’t root them out and go back to Baghdad for old time’s sake at the same time.
Hell, even I can tell you that. And I don’t even have my own institute with the words ‘Middle East’ in it.
