It appears the left of the blogosphere is piling up on center-left Kevin Drum at CalPundit for his comments about the war. Essentially Kevin argues that pulling out now would be disastrous sending a signal to the region and specifically Saddam that he can get away with flouting the inspection regime. And Kevin is right. Pulling out now will signal to Saddam that the US doesn’t have the backbone to fight. Like it or not, the reason inspections have gone as far as they have is because of the credible threat of US force. Backing down from that makes our threat to use force incredible and the credibility of our using force is keeping the Middle East and Korea from blowing up currently.
I would have like to have seen more deft coalition building process take place without as short of a timeline as we now see. I think getting Saddam to jerk around the inspectors would have eventually brought along more allies. That being said, I’m stuck with Bush and I don’t want to see a repeat of Somalia where the message was sent the US would back down from the good fight. And fighting a warlord happy to starve his own people was the good fight.
Of course, the war must first be moral for this argument to make any sense, and I argue it is. Saddam is a threat to international peace and security and continues to attempt to build weapons. Containment is unlikely to work against a man who has an uncanny ability to make bad decisions repeatedly. And he is a savage dictator to boot. Whether we need to go to war is a debatable point, but arguing that once you have made the conclusion the war would be moral, arguing that credibility requires it is a reasonable view. Most of the criticisms of Kevin fail to see the two step logic–Kevin already concluded such a war would be moral and then moves on to the issue of what we should do now.
He’s less right about the intelligence matter, but I think people are being unfair in their criticisms. I guess the first question there is does one accept that intelligence as a meaningful trait. All, but the Sowell article seem to dance around that question. I accept it as a meaningful trait. We can measure the difference in intelligence between different human beings. Sometimes our measures are quite crude, but that is a measurement issue. I guess if people are going to dispute his point, everyone should begin with this basic point. So let’s hear the comments. This point is completely separate from the hack work in the Bell Curve.