Jonah Goldberg says that after 9/11, we needed to kick somebody's butt, and Iraq's butt made the most sense. An excerpt from a most readable column:
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is to beat the tar out of a bad guy — even if that bad guy was "innocent" of the specific offense that ticked you off. If a crackhead robs your house, there's no reason in the world you should feel bad about shutting down all of the crackhouses in your neighborhood. If a rat bites your baby, would you tell your wife "Well, honey, I know there's a whole rat's nest out in the backyard, but there's no way I can identify the specific rat that bit the baby. So, there's nothing I can do."I doubt Saddam had anything to do with planning 9/11 and frankly I don't give a damn. The lesson of the 3,000 dead was that we're going to take our responsibilities seriously again. And that means cleaning up unfinished business and telling the rest of the world we are serious. Nobody — nobody — has made a remotely persuasive case for why it would have been good to keep Saddam in power. Nobody dares make the case that Saddam and his regime didn't deserve everything they got — because that would be like arguing you shouldn't fix the shot brakes on your car because your last accident was the result of bald tires.
It's not all quite this flip. But it is vintage Goldberg. Speaking of Jonah, read his mom's review of NR Editor Rich Lowry's new book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years
Posted by dan at October 20, 2003 09:24 PM