the memory hole

Not for the first time, Matthew Yglesias throws out a typical insouciant comment on his Atlantic Online blog. Also not for the first time, he gets his ass chewed out by a commenter:

We invaded Iraq “for no real reason”? This has to be the stupidest remark printed in The Atlantic in 150 years. Yglesias should stop posting until he’s at least able to pass a Jr. High current events quiz.

Besides murdering God knows how many Iraqis with routine police-state methods, Iraq killed about a million people and created a world recession by invading Iran, using wmd’s liberally (including to help kill about 250,000 Kurds), rocketing supertankers, etc in the process.

Hardly pausing for breath afterwards, Iraq then invaded, raped, and annexed Kuwait, a charter member of the UN and a US ally, killing about 300,000 of its citizens and dragging us into a war, firing missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, and torching the oilfields for good measure.

Given this history, and the fact that we discovered a nuclear program mere months away from producing a viable weapon, strict terms on this and other matters were included in the ceasefire agreement. It was comprehensively violated by Iraq, as were the subsequent 16 Chapter VII UNSC Resolutions. Further efforts to control Iraq’s behavior made us complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Shi’ia who rose up at our behest, the near-total destruction of the Marsh Arabs and the ecosystem that had sheltered them for millenia, and the deaths of perhaps a million of the most vulnerable Iraqis by means of sanctions. By 2003, we had an army of nearly half a million perched on the edge of the Arabian desert with summer coming, and Iraq still, according to Hans Blix, in blatant material breech of its obligations, leaving us with the choice of keeping our word about “serious consequences”, or surrender. This amounts to “no real reason”?

You must be out of your mind.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 19, 2007 3:37 PM

The Sun’s Eli Lake is content merely to question Mr. Yglesias’s logic:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he’s a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to.

Eli

Posted by Eli Lake | November 19, 2007 3:36 PM

Don’t expect any fireworks, or any additional expenditure of brain cells from Mr Yglesias. He never answers such inconvenient questions—especially one that would acknowledge the case against Saddam that Democrats were making during Clinton’s regime, long before 9/11.

These questions expose Yglesias’s blind partisanship, the incoherence of his political arguments, and his intellectual dishonesty. Mostly, though, they expose his peace-at-any-price foreign policy instinct.

That instinct is going to be tested again and again in the coming years. The dangers beyond the water’s edge are real. We want a secretary of state, not to mention a president, who gets that.