Ross Douthat does such an excellent job responding to Jonathan Chait’s follow-up I feel like I’m just piling on.

But since Chait addresses me personally, I will anyway. Chait makes two points, one defensive, one aggressive – the latter more true to his style. The defensive point is that he thinks he should be allowed to be semi-serious except when people take him seriously. At which point he gets to invoke the get-out-of-jail-free “I was just kidding” card. I have no problem with the use of effective sarcasm. The problem is that his sarcasm wasn’t effective. Lots of people didn’t know if Chait was serious. Indeed, as Ross demonstrates, leading that list is Chait himself.

Chait’s second point is:

Alas, discussion is not what I have provoked, at least not yet. Jonah Goldberg, for instance, writes as if the idea were so self-evidently ridiculous it need not be rebutted. But Jonah himself has admitted elsewhere that the Iraq war was a mistake, something any sane person recognizes. So, if Jonah could go retroactively have his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power! Why does he think that? Obviously, because the situation in Iraq now is a lot worse than it was when Saddam was in power. (And it was pretty bad then, which is one reason I favored the war.)
Now, I realize you can’t just say that because the war was a mistake then restoring Saddam is the best option. But it does suggest that dismissing the idea out of hand isn’t quite as easy as it seems.

Oh, no. It’s really quite easy to dismiss it out of hand.

I admire his effort to make this about me, but this just doesn’t wash. First, I don’t think it follows necessarily from what I wrote that if I had my way Saddam would still be in power. I think the war was a mistake in the sense that it wasn’t pulled off correctly. That hardly means if I had my way, we’d have left Saddam alone for another 3 years. For example, I was also always comfortable contemplating having Saddam assassinated. In short, I think the war — or rather the post-war war — has been mishandled and I think this is somewhat self-evident. But that doesn’t mean if I had my druthers Saddam would still be in power in 2006.

But that is all a red-herring. Of course Chait’s sorta-kinda serious idea is self-evidently ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. Chief among them: it’s impossible. It’s as absurd as saying we should make Rudy Giuliani King of Iraq. It can’t be done. The Shia wouldn’t stand for it. Nor the Kurds. Nor, I should add the American people, Congress or our allies. Why? Well, for starters, any attempt would result in America joining forces with Sunni terrorists to crush dissenting Shia. That’s not really in the realm of plausible options. Is that really something I should have to explain?

Moreover — and Ross didn’t mention this nor did Chait contemplate it — re-installing Saddam would be bad for America. It would demonstrate in clear and unambiguous terms that we are amoral, incompetent, buffoons on myriad levels. It is one thing to advocate installing a strongman along the lines of an Attaturk or a Pinochet — an intellectually defensible position (though a morally and politically difficult one). It is quite another to argue, tongue half out of cheek, that we should put back a genocidal, insane, murderer that we’ve spent decades demonizing on the assumption that this time he’d do what we want. And, again: according to Jonathan, what “we want” would be for him to slaughter tens of thousands of more people in the name of stability and authoritarianism.