Bret Stephens keeps using Vaclav Havel to defend the Iraq war:

Havel made the exposure of tyranny the great task of his life. Kim was tyranny personified. And the war in Iraq was the bruising leap over the wall of global indifference behind which all tyrannies subsist.

No, the Iraq war was a “leap” over the wall of international law. A war justified by falsehoods has nothing to do with “living in truth.” Had it not been for the exaggerated fear of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs and the completely unfounded belief that Hussein was aiding Al Qaeda, it is doubtful that there would have been much support for the invasion, and it is unlikely that the Bush administration would have attacked Iraq solely for the purpose of toppling Hussein. Presenting the Iraq war as a campaign of liberation became most useful when the main justifications proved to be bogus. Even many of the later supporters of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine could not endorse the invasion of Iraq. It was not an intervention to avert a likely calamity, but was instead an unnecessary attack on another state without justification.

The “indifference” to which Stephens refers is what the rest of us call minding our own business. It is not indifference to refuse to start wars for ideological reasons, and there is nothing morally courageous in the willingness to unleash the evils of war on another country. Bush’s “axis of evil” remark was attacked because it indicated a reckless willingness to plunge the United States into as many as three wars with all the terrible costs to the U.S. and their respective regions that these would entail.