You know I just don’t get it. I can totally understand why you might think that it was a bad idea to go into Iraq in the first place, but I can not for the life of me, fathom how a civilized person can support the idea of us leaving that country at the present time, for what will most assuredly result in genocide. ~Glen Dean

Clark challenged Mr. Dean on this post, and Mr. Dean wrote back in the comments:

Clarke [sic], that post had to do with the irony of left wing opposition to the occupation in Iraq, not right wing. The differences in you and the lefties, is that you are not calling for us to enter into Sudan while simultaneously calling for us to leave Iraq. You don’t oppose intervention in Iraq while supporting intervention in a lot of other places.

Actually, it seems that Mr. Dean’s post had to do with calling people who support withdrawl from Iraq barbarians.  If he cannot fathom how a “civilized person” can advocate leaving Iraq, given the likelihood of what he calls genocide, he presumably cannot consider those who do advocate leaving Iraq to be civilised people.  Mr. Dean does go on to criticise the left for their Bush-hating and says:

They hate George Bush so much that they are willing to perpetuate our defeat in Iraq, thus bringing about genocide in that country.

It is really sick when you think about it.

This is the curious idea that ending your participation in the war that has made a genocide at least a possibility is more morally objectionable than continuing your contribution to the potentially genocide-causing war, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.  If there is a danger of even larger-scale sectarian and ethnic warfare in Iraq, that would mean that those who opposed the war citing the ethnic and sectarian instability of the country would have been proven right, which means that their arguments for withdrawal might benefit from the same sort of insight that led the war opponents to anticipate the disaster the war supporters were unleashing.  

In the last resort, with nothing left, flinging accusations of enabling genocide has become something of a standard argument in pro-war circles.  This standard argument often, but not always, invokes Vietnam, or rather Cambodia in connection with Vietnam.  Bringing the war into Cambodia was necessary and right, as some would tell it, but the genocide that happened later was all the fault of people who wanted to end American involvement, even though it was bringing the war into Cambodia that set off the chain of events that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.  But, hey, stuff happens.  Mr. Dean assures Clark that he was not coming after those of us on the right for any signs of “Bush Derangement Syndrome” (how reassuring)–but he would still lump us in with all of the genocide-enablers, whereas those who have been hawks from day one are obviously deeply concerned about the plight of all the tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have already died.  They’re civilised people, after all, not like those antiwar barbarians who eat uncooked meat and live in tents. 

Indeed, some crazy person, obviously boorish and uncivilised, might start throwing around the g-word in connection with our Iraq policy for the last 16 years, since arguably more people have died through sanctions and American wars against Iraq than have perished in that supposed “genocide” in Darfur.  But that would be crazy.  Unfortunately, those of us who have protested and opposed these sorts of interventionist policies all along are not as civilised as those who would like to perpetuate them, so we must simply grunt and howl in our heathen rage.      

*With apologies to Konstantinos Kavafis (a.k.a., Cavafy)