October 26, 2005

Observing the "2,000 dead soldiers" event, Andrew Sullivan characterizes the positives in the Iraq campaign and the broader war. I've arranged his points into a handy bullet list, thus:

• Saddam Hussein's regime has been deposed.
• Iraq has a new constitution that emerged from a democratic process.
• Iraq will soon have a democratically elected parliament and government.
• The Sunni Arab minority is participating in this democratic process.
• Iraq has not dissolved into civil war.
• Unemployment is dropping.
• The United States had not suffered another major terror attack since the fall of 2001.

He then writes,

The fact that the administration has made countless, terrible errors in the aftermath of the invasion and miscalculated badly on how the Baathists and Jihadists would fight back, should not distract us from these underlying realities.

Given the positive results he describes... what, exactly, are the consequences of these "countless, terrible errors?" Does he believe that we could have achieved more positive results? That we could have achieved the same results sooner? Or, perhaps, with fewer flag - draped caskets?

I asked him these questions, but haven't heard back from him just yet. I probably won't... I offended him in our last e - mail exchange by suggesting that his animus towards the administration, as reflected in his snarky tone and his frequent use of the kind of rhetoric he claimed to despise in 2001 - 2002, was motivated by Bush's betrayal of him as a gay man. Later that same week, he wrote:

Maybe the fact that I once truly did buy into this makes me more jaundiced today. I really wanted the man to succeed; believed he could; and, given the stakes, I felt it was almost irresponsible not to support him in the war and defend him from his worst and least principled critics (most of whom still make me retch). If so, filter my current negativism through the prism of my previous enthusiasm. Maybe I'm over - reacting.

Probably be a coincidence, although I'm sure he'd never admit that I might've had any influence on him whatsoever. But there you are.