A Bit More on Iraq

When writing about people like Cohen, or for that matter Ignatieff, I'm kind of struck by how little mockery these men are actually subjected to. Both of these men, like a substantial number of pundits, advocated for the war against Iraq. And yet somehow they've earned the right to be taken seriously in a way that Howard Dean, or Al Gore, never did.

A few months ago, Cerbeus asked whether or not Iraq should be a litmus test for Liberal leadership candidates. I said yes, absolutely. My reasons were and are simple. The Iraq War was a simple matter: Either you agreed with the lies (or worse yet, believed them) that were used to justify this crime, or you didn't. The people who were gullible enough to believe those lies, or in Ignatieff's case mendacious enough to invent their own lies ("The American Empire is a good thing!"), are responsible, in their own small way, for this war too. Men like Ignatieff especially represented a gift to the Bush administration - Iggy gave the war a form of humanitarian "cover" it might not have otherwise had.

This isn't to say that Cohen or Ignatieff could have stopped this war - neither is that important. There are almost certainly less than 5 men who could have stopped this war, and they all work frequently on Pennsylvania Ave. Nevertheless, I have a simple question for the audience, about men like Cohen and Ignatieff, not to mention everyone else who supported this crime against world peace:

When to we get to treat them like the moral and intellectual retards they are?

I mean, really: Ignatieff is considered a serious candidate for the Liberal leadership? On what basis? The fact that he was wrong - just plain wrong - on the most important international issue since the end of the Cold War? How does that qualify him for office?

Ignatieff's defense is a familiar one: He believed the war would liberate the Iraqi people. This is what's most frustrating about the pro-war camp: Their inability to separate reality from fantasy. Ignatieff thought he was supporting the war that would liberate Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz supported a war that would break up OPEC and remove a threat to Israel. Donald Rumsfled supported a war that would prove his concepts of "transformation" in the military. George Bush, for his part, supported a war that would find Iraq in posession of WMDs.

And me, I supported the war where we got to go kill some Nazis again. Given this crowd, who's going to tell me I was being irrational?

In the real world, men like Ignatieff, Cohen, and the rest of the pro-war crowd weren't supporting the liberation of Iraq or the preservation of world peace. They were supporting exactly the kind of war we were all likely to suffer with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in charge. They were supporting an incompetently-committed war crime, and nothing more.

Now if only Cohen could stop clutching his pearls long enough to write about that obscenity, instead of some nasty letters he got.