A moment I've been predicting has arrived.
As it became more and more obvious that the current situation in Iraq is more of a threat to our peace and security than the situation that existed prior to March of 2003, eventually the war's supporters were going to have to deal with that unpleasant fact. I figured that instead of admiting we made a strategic error, they'd start playing with 'what-if' history...
Yes, Iraq is on the verge of chaos, but this would have happened anyway! At least we have troops on the ground to help keep it under some kind of control. Eventually, Sadaam would have died or been overthrown, and all hell would have broken loose, not just in Iraq, but in the entire region!
So they would no longer even try to make the case that we created a more secure situation than the one we faced in 2003. Rather, they'll compare the situation we ceated with some hypothetical one that might someday have come into existence when the regime collapsed on its own.
Christopher Hitchens made the leap today in an article in the weekly standard. Look for the neo-cons to start using it more and more if, as seems likely, things continue to worsen in Iraq.
Money quote: "In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling. At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions."
Here's the entire article.
(by the way, I'm a big fan of Hitch and always have been)
Of course, its entirely possible that things would have imploded eventually, leading to opportunistic invasions by its neighbors. Its also entirely possibile that another Baathist general would have taken control (keeping the Shiites under Sunni domination as they had been for two hundred years). Heck, the new general might have even tried to make peace with the west (this is not pure fancy, its in fact what the first Bush administration was figuring would happen.)
Of course, we'll never know what would have happened had we not invaded. But when the war's supporters start comparing the existing situation with a hypothetical one in order to make their case, you know we've reached a turning point.
