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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, April 01, 2004 :::
David Gelernter has an excellent column in The Weekly Standard in which he discusses the "small-scale holocaust" that was going on in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and how stopping it was a good deed, if not a moral imperative. He states, inter alia:
I don't claim that Saddam resembles Hitler; I do claim that the world's indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.
One of the problems of history is that it is not a very good laboratory. Just as we cannot say what would have happened if Hussein had not been removed, we cannot say what would have happened if Hitler had been removed a few years earlier, before he was able to build up Germany's military strength to the fearsome level he did. Thought experiment: Imagine Churchill becoming Prime Minister a few years before he actually did and managing to build a military coalition strong enough to remove Hitler, on the grounds that he failed to obey the rearmament treaty restrictions placed on Germany after the Great War and was developing some really fearsome weapons. Fair enough, you say, -- this analogy has been beaten to death.
But can you envision Neville Chamberlain, elected in the populist anti-war backlash of 1935, et al. going around for years afterwards condemning this as a thoughtless act of violence responsible for many deaths and accomplishing nothing? I can. And really no one would have known any better. Preemption is dangerous in that you never know what would have happened if you had waited. Waiting is dangerous for the same reason. Gelernter argues persuasively that there's enough evidence this time for us to know the war in Iraq was morally just. And he doesn't even go into all those treaty violations.
::: posted by Eric at 6:34 PM
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