"Imagine" updated

There was a very interesting opinion piece in my newspaper the other day. In it, the author posed the question of what Libya would be like today if Qaddify hadn't given up his Weapons of Mass Destruction back in 2003. Although the author doesn't go into any particulars, he makes a great point in his short piece. You can find it right here.

What's great about this piece is how the author manages to undercut any counter-argument before it can even be mounted. Observe:

In light of what some are now describing as a civil war in Libya, with the regime in Tripoli fighting for its life, this is not insignificant. If someone wants to believe that freedom fever would have spread this year even without the Iraq War, they still have to face the fact that without that war the wave of popular protest would have unleashed revolutionary anarchy in a potentially leaderless country with WMD–significant WMD, at that. When Qaddafi gave up his program, Americans were startled to learn that it was much further developed than most intelligence experts had thought. It included centrifuges, uranium enrichment facilities, and dual-use labs.

Some who still cant countenance any positive outcome from the invasion of Iraq might argue that this is a mere one-off unpredictable side-effect of a war that has otherwise caused great geopolitical damage. But, in truth, cleansing a dictatorial regime of its WMD so that the weapons would not be used by the unstable dictator or obtained by extremists after his ouster was precisely the kind of thing proponents of the Iraq War hoped to accomplish.

From a purely domestic view, Bush was not conservative, and therefore a poor choice as a President. But he more than made up for this deficiency by being aware that what happened in the Middle East could effect us here at home. And with the upswing of Islamic fundamentalism coupled with a desire to damage democracy and terrorize others of a different belief system being embraced by more and more Middle Eastern autocrats, the best way to fight this kind of movement was to promote democracy.

As we all know, elections have consequences. Had we elected somebody who was as strong in the foreign department as Bush was, would we be having as much uproar and unrest in the Middle East as we are now?

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