Why Oh Why Can't We Have Less Ignorant Right-Wing Webloggers?
Scott Lemieux watches the latest intellectual hand-car wreck:
Lawyers, Guns and Money: Today in Non Sequitur Theater: After pointing out that more Americans have died in the Iraq war than in 9/11, Althouse--quite remarkably at this late date--asks:
A key question -- with an unknowable answer -- is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?
And Scott gives the obvious answer:
[Since] Iraq had no substantial connection to Anti-American terrorism and posed no security threat whatsoever to the United States, the overwhelmingly likely answer is "zero." Whatever Iraq was, it wasn't "fighting back" against the Islamic radicals who actually attacked New York.
Of course, if it was only Republican pundits who don't actually know anything about foreign policy who think that replacing a secular dictatorship with an Islamist quasi state was an effective way of "fighting back" against Islamic terrorism, this would be relatively harmless (although pathetic.) The truly appalling thing is that people actually in charge of American policymaking also didn't demand any logical connection between a given military response and the actual threat facing the country, and as a result nearly three thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died for nothing.
But if they were less ignorant, Scott, they wouldn't be right-wing webloggers, would they?
