Andrew Beath became the first person to use the new comments feature on my blog. Very fun to make it a bit of a conversation, and my apologies to him that I didn't get a chance to acknowledge it before now. I'm afraid he hasn't convinced me that there are decent arguments against the Iraq war however. To start with, we need to make one thing clear:

It's interesting to compare Japan & Germany circa WWII with Iraq now and to think about the differences that made occupation succeed in the former, but fail in the latter... Invading a high unstable, very fragmented and quite poor country with a foreign army (which isn't exactly universally loved in the region) is a real recipe for disaster, as the past ten months has borne out.

"Fail" in the latter [Iraq]? "A real recipe for disaster, as the past ten months has borne out?" The past ten months have borne out nothing of the kind, and to claim that the Iraqi occupation has failed is not merely ridiculously premature, but quite wrong.

Premature, because it's only been ten months. As late as 1947 it looked like Japan might fall to a Communist revolution, and the situation in Germany was no better. But ten years after the occupation, in 1955, most Japanese were happy about the changes the Occupation had made in their country. If, within the next few months, there is a genocidal civil war in Iraq, comparable in brutality to the regime of Saddam Hussein, then critics of the war will have some justification in asserting that the occupation failed. At the present time, such a claim is absurd.

It is also wrong, because Iraq has made a lot of progress in the past ten months. Here is The Economist's report on the new constitution. True, it also describes two terrorist atrocities, which killed 170 people, the worst since the occupation began. But a sense of proportion is essential here. 170 Shia deaths is a tragedy, but one much smaller in scale than the hundreds of thousands killed by the sanctions, or by Saddam's regime, let alone the millions killed in Saddam's wars. 170 Shia deaths is a tragedy, but in no way comparable to the triumph of 22 million people who lived in fear and who now live in freedom. Iraqis have been showing a strong desire for elections and democracy lately, and now have a constitution which recognizes basic rights established hardly anywhere in the Islamic world. The electricity is back on, mostly; the press is free; public sentiment is increasingly opposed to terrorism and violence, and the Iraqi police are learning to deal with this on their own; the ethnic groups are learning to compromise. Al Qaeda, foreseeing that the Americans' withdrawal and the coming of elections will ruin the pretext for their ongoing campaign of terror, is resorting to desperate measures. But Iraq has already come a long way, so that backsliding to Saddam's rule is improbable.

1. "[E]veryone else thought [that Iraq had WMDs] too" . . . former UN Weapons Inspectors (Scott Ritter) and the current UN Weapons Inspectors certainly did not seem to think so.

Well, I didn't follow Scott Ritter, only Hans Blix, and he certainly did seem to think so. So did French intelligence, German intelligence, and so forth. So did Wesley Clark, John Kerry, and so forth. So did The Economist magazine. Everyone thought so, it's that simple. But whatever, WMDs are quite superfluous to the case for war anyway.

2. The broken UN resolution thingy doesn't work. First, he complied with UN resolutions in the lead-up to war. Second, Israel has flouted an insane number of UN resolutions with complete impunity.

Well, first, Saddam did not comply with the first UN resolution. The first UN resolution gave him only 45 days, and he took a lot more. Even when he let inspectors in, Hans Blix was not satisfied with the level of cooperation. Inspections were always a false middle ground anyway, as the aftermath of war has made clear: even with the regime removed and the new authority (the US and UK) highly motivated to find the WMDs, it took us months to confirm that they weren't there.

As for Israel, to say that we should allow Iraq to violate UN resolutions with impunity because Israel is like saying we should allow other people to get away with murder because OJ Simpson did. Two wrongs do not make a right. Another way to look at it was that a UN resolution was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the war; Saddam's violation of international law permitted us to start a war that was beneficial for a whole range of other reasons.

3. An argument against sanctions is an argument for removing the sanctions and only that.

No, excuse me, there is no obligation that all arguments be simplistic. Sanctions were the middle ground between, on the one hand, leaving Saddam alone entirely, and, on the other, regime change. If we reject sanctions as inhumane, the options are giving Hussein impunity, and removing him by war. Leaving Saddam alone has two drawbacks: first, it would be easier for him to acquire WMDs if sanctions were removed; second, his people would suffer less economic hardship, but would still live in a terror-state. War opened a door to freedom for the Iraqi people, and also removed a ruler who, as it turns out, was not much of a threat as long as he was pent up by sanctions, but certainly had been one, and would become one again if we stopped clipping his wings. Thus, an argument against sanctions is an argument for regime change or removing the sanctions unilaterally; if the second option is rejected, then it becomes an argument for the first.

4. A few of gov'ts that are as bad, if not worse than Saddam that could be easily overthrown and which Bush seems have next to no interest in messing with . . . Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Burma, Uzbekistan, Pakistan etc., plus places like Congo, Uganda and Indonesia we're lots of people die from civil war and nobody seems to care.

First, there is no reason that if we overthrow one bad regimes we have to overthrow them all. Better one than none. And the US is hardly strong enough to overthrow all these regimes. Anyway, none of the regimes listed here are as bad as Saddam's was, in my opinion; the only one that comes close is Zimbabwe. But if this is an argument to apply the muscular support for human rights and anti-totalitarian interventionism more broadly across the world, then I agree.

I'll end with a question, though . . . given the assumption that Saddam was to be overthrown, wouldn't an invasion of a coalition of forces from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey been a Pareto improvement over a US invasion? At least that wouldn't have turned Iraq into the terror-state it is today.

First, Iraq is not a "terror-state." It was a terror-state until a few months ago. Now it is coalescing as a constitutional state, respectful of a range of constitutional rights, and committed to representing Iraq's various ethnic groups. It is also a country afflicted by terror, the importance is much exaggerated by a sensational (and mostly anti-war) press, but which is certainly a serious problem.

Second, about the invasion by Iraq's neighbors, no, it would not be better. What kind of government would Saudi Arabia impose? Hardly a democracy. As for Turkey, Iraqis rejected the offer of Turkish troops to participate in the occupation; they have had bad experiences with Turkish troops in the past. Moreover, these countries probably could not have won a war against Saddam, certainly not as quickly and cleanly as the US and the UK did. Germany and Japan made successful transitions to constitutional self-government, and Iraq shows signs of being in the process of a similar successful transition, not because of anything in their own cultures but rather because of the values and political personality of the occupying power.

Third, an invasion by Iraq's neighbors was obviously never an option. Iraqis are rather resentful of their neighbors, in fact, because they were so supportive of Saddam; and a lot of Jordanians, for that matter, were rather resentful of Iraqis for welcoming American tanks into Baghdad to topple a president they were so fond of. The Arabs would hardly even coalesce willingly in America's toppling of Saddam, let alone spill their own blood and treasure to do it. So why make a proposal like this? It is symptomatic of the general escapism of the left, which is afflicted by a strange and impossible desire to oppose the war while avoiding the logical corollary: wishing that Saddam were still in power.

To sum up: Iraqis welcomed the fall of Saddam, which could have come about in no other way than through an American-led war; and the occupation so far shows promising signs of leading towards constitutional Iraqi self-rule, even democracy, and is more or less similar in its setbacks and in its successes to the transitions in Germany and Japan.