December 17, 2003
Conventional Wisdom
I don't have a personal blog anymore, so I rarely get to mouth off on issues of the day, which takes some getting used to. That being said, I have two things I need to get off on my chest and it looks like this is the only place to do it:
1. The reconstruction of Iraq should not be an issue of spoils. I understand why some would see the issue of who gets contracting jobs in Iraq as an issue of spoils -- we took over the country, so our companies should get the benefits, right? Wrong. Contracting jobs shouldn't be cushy agreements handed down like favors; they should be seen as fullfilling objectives in the most cost-effective way possible. I'm dissapointed that those who argue French, German and Russian companies should be given an opportunity to bid do so on the grounds that it would be a magnanimous act of reconciliation. It's not. It's a matter of who can do the best job for the least cost. If it's anything else, the administration proves it went into Iraq to enrich its corporate friends.
2. Capturing Saddam doesn't hurt Democrats. Well, it does if the media insists it does without any rational basis, badgering every candidate and pundit to disprove it. No serious person thought we couldn't defeat the Iraqi military. Capturing Saddam may or may not help stop the resistance (which everybody will agree is a good thing), but doing so doesn't strike at the heart of the mainstream anti-war message, which is that our resources should not go to fighting someone who was not as central to the terrorist network as many others. It is now plain to see that Iraq had no plans to attack the U.S. or U.S. interests with WMD (or sticks and stones for that matter).
The "flypaper theory," invented by neocons after the fact to justify the resistance we faced in Iraq, doesn't hold up when we found out nearly all of the people attacking our troops are Iraqis. We didn't drain the swamp -- we created another.
Sure, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but if we went after every brutal dictator in the world, we'd have to reinstate the draft. Why Iraq and not Zimbabwe, where our soldiers at least know the language?
And since when did capturing Saddam become a central goal in the War on Terror? Now that he doesn't control the country, isn't his relevance limited exclusively to any control he might have to the people attacking our troops? The goalposts of success in the War on Terror keep shifting.
As for Dean and the Dems, the capture of Saddam is a tactical victory and should be a political non-starter except for the conventional wisdom's insistence that it means something.
Posted by rj3 at December 17, 2003 11:53 AM
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