Now Watch This Drive: At The Very Serious Conservative Flea Market of Very Bad Ideas

Armed with the hammer of the boundless certainty of their dogma, and the anvil of their sneering contempt for the Left, Republicans like Bret Stephens and Tom Nichols continue their life's work from their respective sinecures -- 

20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War

By Bret Stephens [New York Times]

-- at their respective, respectable publications.

Just War.  

by Tom Nichols  [The Atlantic]

I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything...

Now I'm going to do something unfair.  I'm going to interleave selected quotes from both articles by both men among my comments and not tell you which is which.  

But since both men are highly paid writers-of-opinions for national publications, you surely shouldn't have any trouble distinguishing one from the other by their mighty words alone, right?

Right?

Anyway, here they both are -- 

The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts...

Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime(and wars have started over less), but taken together...

-- doggedly pound away at history -- 

The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power...

But if there was one indisputably real W.M.D. in Iraq, it was Hussein himself. Until his downfall, he put everyone and everything he encountered at risk...

Ultimately, the choice for the United States and our allies in early 2003 wasn’t invasion or containment. It was invasion or, over time, the quasi-rehabilitation of Hussein’s Iraq...

-- excising inconvenient impurities -- 

And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better...

Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War... 

Critics of the war now make the point that the intelligence fiasco wrecked America’s credibility. It’s true. But no less damaging was the never-ending “Bush lied” charge that, 10 years later, morphed into the “Obama lied” charge when it came to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria or the suggestion that President Biden is lying about last year’s sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. One conspiracy theory tends to beget another, in ways that are destructive to all sides... 

-- and adding in retroactive justifications --

In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history...

The problem in Iraq wasn’t simply a matter of faulty decisions, of which — as in every war — there were many. It was of faulty systems. Around the 10th anniversary of the invasion, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction painted a devastating picture of our efforts. Billions of dollars were wasted on projects that were rarely, if ever, completed. Uncle Sam, whose cruise missiles could destroy Iraqi targets with astounding precision, couldn’t keep the lights on in Baghdad...

-- until they have reforged the past into a shiny story of the nobility of their idols, the folly of their enemies and in which they, somehow, have been right all along.

Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war...

Readers will want to know whether, knowing what I know now, I would still have supported the decision to invade. Not for the reasons given at the time. Not in the way we did it. But on the baseline question of whether Iraq, the Middle East and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant, my answer remains yes...

And having hammered an irredeemably vile past into a gleaming mathom (look it up) that no Very Serious Conservative need be ashamed to display on their mantle, both men rush off to sell their trinkets at their respective booths, side-by-side, at the never-ending Very Serious Conservative Flea Market of Very Bad Ideas.  

Behold, a Tip Jar!