Five Things
Posted by David Darlington on 29 July 2007 | one response
ITA friend Joe Carter stirs the pot with his post “This I No Longer Believe: Five Lessons Learned from the Iraq War.” I believe Joe’s words would be echoed by a lot of pro-war (or formerly pro-war) conservatives upset with the way the Iraq war has been prosecuted and how public support for it has been lost. Joe’s pessimism won’t win him any fans though.
One Response to “Five Things”
Eh — the post just seems to manage to mangle some of the main historical lessons of Vietnam; recycle Goldberg’s morally deficient misunderstanding of Obama’s position; and confuse the war in Iraq with the more general war on terror under the spurious rubric of a ‘war on jihadism’, even though more sensible voices are waking up to the dangers of this confusion. (No such voices yet in evidence among the GOP presidential frontrunners, alas.) It seems to me more a profound inability to learn new lessons, rather than a list of real lessons learned.
Really, the Dreher post that he links to is just tons better, as are a string of related posts on Andrew Sullivan’s site, e.g.,
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/i-no-longer-b-1.html
I also strongly recommend the ever-brilliant hilzoy:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/07/lessons-learned.html