Matt Yglesias Is A Moral Leper

Matt Yglesias, a snobby, know-it-all, chomskyite punk who graduated from Harvard the same year the war in Iraq began, has deigned to enlighten the rest of us about how horrible the people who supported the war in Iraq really are,

The harsh reality is that (the Iraq war) was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

First of all, let me say that Matt Yglesias has probably never been stirred by “the shibboleths of American patriotism” in his entire life, so I’m sure he can’t accurately comment on the United States from that perspective.

Since that’s the case, it’s unsurprising that Yglesias calls the war in Iraq a “criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards.”

Of course, to believe that, you have to believe that your political opponents are madmen, that the majority of Americans — including the majority of Democratic senators — are “fools and cowards” and that our troops are no better than the thugs who carry out hits for the Mafia.

Moreover, only someone who doesn’t truly appreciate the worth of freedom could look at the blood and treasure the United States spent to help the Iraqis get their fledgling democracy on its feet and call that a “criminal enterprise.” Most people who think that way are enemies of the United States, people who have never lived in a free country, or (cough, cough) pampered Westerners who’ve had it so easy for their entire lives that they have trouble comprehending what living without freedom is really like.

Although liberals like Yglesias would never admit it, our mistake in Iraq was not having insufficiently noble motives, it was our willingness to sacrifice too much for noble ends. That’s the true “reality of…the past eight years of US foreign policy.”

As I’ve said before,

Had we known then what we know today, we’d have probably put a friendly Sunni general in charge of Iraq, let him make us some empty promises about democracy, given them a little aid, and walked away.

That would have produced considerably fewer Iraqi deaths and much more importantly, would have saved hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. However, had we gone that route, the Iraqi people wouldn’t be living in a democracy today. So, what we really spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives for was freedom for the Iraqi people. Calling that a “criminal enterprise” is the act of a moral leper.

PS #1: Barack Obama has made such a big deal out of the fact that he opposed the war in Iraq from the get-go. However, how much courage did it take to oppose the war from the state Senate in Illinois? The majority of Democrats in the Senate (including Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Joe Biden) supported the war back then — and given that Barack Obama has proven to be positively Clintonesque when it comes to changing his positions with the political wind, it seems extremely likely that he would have voted for the war in Iraq had he been in the Senate in 2002.

PS #2: Yglesias’ comments about Obama not “really acting to marginalize the bad actors” because of his “political objectives” are comical — given that Barack selected Joe Biden as his VP, Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, and kept on Robert Gates as his SecDef. Obviously, his anti-war shtick is mostly just that — shtick. If he really believed what he was saying, there’s no way he’d have ever filled all those key foreign policy positions with people who were in favor of the war in Iraq.

PS #3: I love the people over at The Corner, but I have never really gotten why they seem to take liberals like Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan so seriously. Pretty much the only thing these two nincompoops have going for them compared to the other bloggers on the left is that they make illogical arguments trashing America and conservatives, using words with more syllables than the other lefty bloggers. Whoop-de-d*mn-do.

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