I didn't start reading The Stranger until I started my Thursday trek to Issaquah, which takes me by at least two bus stops with Stranger boxes. Therefore, I missed Dan Savage's support for the war in Iraq, which I only know about now because he regrets it. Well, he does and he doesn't. He regrets that he was taken in by the Bushies' attempts to link Saddam and Osama, and conflate Baathism with Islamo-fascism
and that he supported the war under false information, but he does not regret the war itself.
Saddam Hussein was our man in Baghdad for years, our creation, our problem. And that it's costing American lives and money to remove Saddam Hussein from power is, in a sense, only right.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. I'm disappointed that he showed himself so gullible about Bush's smoke-and-mirrors propaganda, but I'm less sure about whether I'm disappointed in his support for the war. I agree that it is just for our country to be suffering for our past support of Hussein's regime, but we should not be suffering pointlessly. The Iraqis are suffering too! We invaded them, and they are (rightly) none too happy with us. (Heck, I wouldn't trust us either.) The war isn't working, for them or for us.
The fact that we screwed up in the past doesn't mean that we should jump in alone and fix
things in our clumsy way, it means that we need to cooperate with other nations and the UN to find a better solution. The fact that everyone else disagrees with us probably means something...
So I regret Dan Savage's past support for the war, even if he doesn't, but I support the continued presence of US troops in Iraq, because however bad it is now, it would get worse if we left. It's a decades-long slog, and I only wish that I could sentence Bush to 50 years on the ground in Iraq, without the turkey.
Jim says:
"Saddam Hussein was our man in Baghdad for years, our creation, our problem. And that it's costing American lives and money to remove Saddam Hussein from power is, in a sense, only right."
Who is this Dan Savage, and where did he learn "right" and "wrong"? The lives and money being "spent" now in Iraq aren't those of the individuals who put and kept SH in power.