The Cost of Iraq

Over in Commentary, former Bush administration official Peter Wehner offers up an interesting piece of moral asymmetry:

The ultimate wisdom in initiating the Iraq war is still to be validated by contingent events still to unfold. What is happening today is a transition, not a final triumph....

Still, it is worth pointing out that those who wrote off the war as unwinnable and a miserable failure, who made confident, sweeping arguments that have been overturned by events, and who had grown so weary of the conflict that they were willing to consign Iraqis to mass slaughters and America to a historically consequential defeat -- they were thankfully, blessedly wrong.

I find this line of defense for the troop surge frankly bewildering. Wehner claims that those who wanted to wind down the war in 2006 and 2007 would have been responsible for "mass slaughters." I don't necessarily accept the logic that the U.S. is implicated in one Iraqi's decision to kill another. After all, many Iraqis were being killed by their fellow citizens long before the U.S. entered the picture.

That said, if Wehner wants to pin prospective "mass slaughters" on the conscience of those who wanted to wind down the war, it's fair to ask whether he feels any guilt about the actual mass slaughters that occurred as a consequence of the invasion. If withdrawal advocates were willing to consign Iraqis to their deaths, what can be said of the architects and champions of the Iraq war?

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