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Herman Cain, Iraq War Dead-Ender

Cain should get some credit for being the only Republican candidate crazy or ideological enough to defend the Iraq war in terms of democracy promotion: I agree with former President George W. Bush that the United States should promote free democratic movements throughout the world, and that it is in our strategic interests to do […]

Cain should get some credit for being the only Republican candidate crazy or ideological enough to defend the Iraq war in terms of democracy promotion:

I agree with former President George W. Bush that the United States should promote free democratic movements throughout the world, and that it is in our strategic interests to do so. That does not mean we try to “impose democracy at the barrel of a gun,” as some of Bush’s rather disingenuous critics claimed he was doing. It means we support these movements where the opportunity presents itself (as President Obama should have in Iran and Syria) or when strategic necessity compels us (as I believe President Bush correctly did in Iraq in 2003). And you don’t always have to use force.

First of all, promoting democracy was at best a tertiary reason for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, and it was used as a justification for continuing the disastrous war after the original stated purpose. In fact, there was no strategic necessity that compelled the invasion, and it is now widely agreed outside of a core of dead-enders that the war was a major strategic blunder. Invading another country, toppling its existing government, and then installing a new democratic regime is the very definition of imposing democracy at gunpoint. People who pointed this out weren’t being disingenuous. They were stating the obvious. The U.S. was not supporting any democratic movement in Iraq, and the war was a disaster for the Iraqi people. The effect of the war was to empower a majority whose sectarian and semi-authoritarian leaders have aligned themselves to some degree with both Tehran and Damascus, and the Iraq that the U.S. leaves behind is neither free nor democratic in any meaningful sense that we in the West would recognize. The entire enterprise was a colossal waste and a terrible crime.

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