I wish to commend David French’s column on the homepage. It has a long title, but a title that does the job: “Republican Presidential Contenders’ Cowardly, After-the-Fact Opposition to the Iraq War.” I will say what David says, in far coarser language than he would use: When it comes to the Iraq War, our guys — our presidential contenders — oughta show some sack.
Or should that be “sac”? I’ve never had a definitive ruling on that. In the old days, if you wanted more airpower, you could have said, “Show some SAC.” (Those letters stood for “Strategic Air Command.” Its motto was “Peace is our profession.”)
The French column took me down Memory Lane a bit. A year ago, I interviewed Michael Gove, who was then education secretary in Britain. He is now justice secretary. He is one of the politicians I most admire, and before he got into “the arena,” he was one of the writers I most admired.
I said, “Should we be embarrassed by our support of the Iraq War?” He said a polite British version of “Hell no.” He went on to say, “Of course, mistakes were made — it’s a cliché to say so, but it’s true.” He then cited a column by a friend of his, Matthew d’Ancona, a well-known journalist over there.
The column was written after a young man working at a restaurant tried to make a “citizen’s arrest” of Tony Blair, who was eating in that establishment. The column ended,
One wonders how many detainees have been maimed and killed since the [House of] Commons rejected possible military action against the Syrian dictator last August. This, of course, is Blair’s strongest point: that inaction, as much as intervention, has a cost. It is not always right to intervene, and often impractical to do so in any case. But those who do nothing should be held to account, too. Who interrupts the appeaser’s meal?
No one interrupts the appeaser’s meal, ever.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, George W. Bush said over and over, “There are risks of action and risks of inaction. I have to weigh those risks.” No one ever thinks of the risks of inaction — at least after action has taken place. And preemption is a thankless task. There will always — forever — be those who say that preemption was unnecessary. The rattlesnake would have slunk off all by itself. You did not have to kill it.
Back to Gove — who said to me, “What would have happened if we hadn’t acted [in Iraq]? Nobody explores that counterfactual. And I think it would have been disastrous.” Gove continued, “I’ll put it in crude terms — and this is a difficult area — but when we applied the maximum amount of resolution, i.e., during the surge, then the benefits were being reaped, and it was only when we felt, ‘Okay, we’re ahead and we can quit now,’ that problems arose. In dealing with these things, you must not succumb to attention deficit disorder.”
One could go on at length — and there are respectable arguments on all sides of this debate — but I mainly wanted to hail David French for his column, which is not only right, in my opinion, but took some nerve, in the current environment.
A presidential candidate who shows nerve, and even says unpopular things — unpopular and true things: him I would stand up and salute.