Map of major operations and battles of the Iraq War as of 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This! From Moe Lane.
(Via Instapundit) This is a pet peeve of mine, and it got triggered by this otherwise not-as-bad-as-it-could-have been article on Obama’s Syria debacle (the NYT prefers the term ‘nightmare’):
American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American non-interventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates.
Stop. Freeze-frame. Rewind. Look at those two sentences. Also look at that word ‘equally,’ which means that the author of this piece wants his readers to conclude that there aretwo separate military situations here, each one of which was, well, equally disastrous.
But that’s not even remotely true. We have one situation here. To wit: from 2001 to 2003 the United States did some long overdue corrective actions in the Middle East. First, we went into Afghanistan and broke the neck of the regime that hosted the group that attacked us on 9/11. Then we went into Iraq and broke the neck of the regime that had been an active danger to the entire region for the previous two, three decades – and that we had unfinished business with, too. Kind of important, that. After all of that we had an insurgency develop – which is something that happens when you occupy nation-states – and then we proceeded to beat that insurgency without resorting to the usual rule of slaughtering the population*.
Source: Moe Lane » Let us stop pretending that the Iraq War was the Worst Thing Ever.
