It occurred to me that yesterday's post on Iraq did not spend enough time on the question of regime change. First, be clear that invading Iraq will have some positive outcomes. Eventually. Perhaps in a year or two. Right now, the majority of Iraqi people are enduring a lower standard of living that they had before the war. This should not be a surprise to people. I'm sure the same thing occurred to the Japanese and Germans after World War II. But things will get better and I am thankful for that.
But lets be clear about one thing, we didn't invade Iraq to make things better for the Iraqi people and we surely didn't cross into sovereign territory to save the trees. While those things might be happy unintended consequences of our action, it wasn't why we went in. We went in, I hope, because we felt it was in our own best interests to do so.
Let me repeat that. We invaded a sovereign country because we felt it was in our best interests to do so. If this were only about regime change we would be in Rwanda, or Sudan, or Ivory Coast, or Zimbabwe. Those nations, if I can use that term, are hell holes. Millions of their citizens have been slaughtered like cattle. Literally. Yet, the U.S. does nothing.
Why? Because we don't see these African countries as threats to us and they don't have that much in resources that we feel are strategic to our country. I'm not going to get dragged into a discussion about oil so I will leave that to others. But my first point, being a threat to us is what my post from yesterday was about.
Either Hussein was an imminent threat to us or he wasn't. Hence, if you are President Bush, it seems to me you have two options. Use spin control and say it really wasn't about weapons of mass destruction at all: It was about regime change and saving the trees. Or, you can race around the desert trying to find the weapons (and Hussein).
