“Suck it, losers! I’ll never leave you alone!”
Charles Pierce has heard enough from the well-fed elites who have spent the better part of the last week bloviating about the costs of war and whether or not Iraq was worth it and just how right, in the end, they probably were anyway:
Shut up, all of you. Go away. You are complicit in one way or another in a giant crime containing many great crimes. Atone in secret. Wash the blood off your hands in private. Because there were people who got it right. Anthony Zinni. David Shiseki. Hans Blix. Mohamed ElBaradei. The McClatchy Washington bureau guys. Dozens of liberal academics who got called fifth-columnists and worse. Professional military men whose careers suffered as a result. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the world. The governments of Canada and France. Those people, I will listen to this week. Go to hell, the rest of you, and go there in silence and in shame.
But of course they won’t. Bill Keller will keep writing his wretched “Get Off My Lawn” columns, and David Frum will continue to gain acceptance among “moderate” and even a few lefty intellectual-types who just want to understand how the other side thinks, and Richard Perle will continue to write bullshit like this, which is, frankly, an intellectual affront to the vast majority of sentient beings:
Removing him would mean war. Leaving him in power, with the means and motive to cause horrendous damage to the United States, would mean accepting the risk that he might place weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists out to kill Americans. The war to remove Saddam’s regime was a classic case of managing risk under conditions of uncertainty.
Many commentaries on the Iraq War, including the one to which this is a response, show little understanding of what it means to manage risk. We do not normally consider it to have been foolish to pay for fire insurance when the house does not burn down — or particularly clever to have done so when it does. When thousands of American lives are at stake, insurance, sometimes pre-emptive military action, is not cheap.
It is senseless to argue that because Saddam turned out not to possess the weapons our intelligence establishment was convinced he had, the decision to remove him was wrong…
Holy hell, good fucking grief. Managing risk? Can you believe this guy? Pierce, again:
Precisely what risk did you “manage”? What chance did you take? You gambled with other people’s children in a game you’d helped rig. What cost was exacted from you, sitting your fat ass in a swivel chair at a wingnut intellectual chop-shop while kids are still staggering around the wards without legs and arms, or the cognitive functions to get them through the day? What price did you pay? You have to send out for lunch one day? Show me the butcher’s bill for the Perle household, you vampire son of a bitch.
Look, the tragedies of the Iraq War are myriad. The sheer cost of life, the permanent disfigurement of countless people, the monetary expense, the fires set around the region, the silencing of dissent, the constitutional defamation perpetrated by a sitting President, the remarkable complicity of a sitting Congress, the damage done to the American “brand,” and, again, the sheer cost of life: all of these are tragedies. But the fact that men like Richard Perle are still making abstract arguments when all of that is as clear as crystal is astounding, even to cynical ole’ me. And the fact that men like him are still counted among “the elite” should, with finality, disabuse you of the notion that such people should be paid any mind at any point, ever. Because it is outrageous that people like this are still gainfully employed, let alone not in prison.
Iraq was a tragedy, and millions of people around the world saw it coming. Frankly, it wasn’t that hard to see. But you never would know this by listening to our press corps, or our government, or our precious elites in general. They were so certain, and the dissenting few were so marginal, and absurd, and hilarious. At least, at the very least: we should see these people get their come-uppance. But of course we never will, because they never do.
Just another day in the world’s oldest republic.
UPDATE: Michael Tomasky listened to Perle’s interview this morning on NPR, and thinks he can now see how Perle sleeps at night:
At the end came the clincher. Was it worth it, she asked. Perle regretted to say that that wasn’t a fair or legitimate question. Too retrospective. So that’s how these people wipe the blood off their hands. Decide that the one question that might potentially force a painful coming to terms with the awfulness of what you’ve done is out of bounds. I thought you might find this a useful tip with which to start your day.
Go. Away.
