What opposing the Iraq war *doesn't* mean

It doesn't mean being isolationist, or even pacifist. It *does* allow for strategic evaluation of the effect that our blunders on the ground have on the hearts and minds of potential allies and potential terrorists. Being antiwar doesn't mean carrying flowers or hating the country. Hunter does an excellent job of exposing the strawman, beloved of the mainstream media, in his rant here.

And the Iraq War was a boondoggle from the start (1) because it did not address the most serious actual roots or supporters of global terrorism, (2) because it wasted resources that needed to be expended in Afghanistan to assure the success of war and post-war efforts there, (3) because it inflamed tensions that didn't need to be inflamed, (4) because it shredded international support for the real War on Terror -- support that had reached nearly unprecedented levels of global unity, before the war, and which represented the only real way to combat international terrorist organizations and movements, and (5) because it represented a wider Arab conflict with the West that was the expressed goal of Osama bin Laden's terrorist movement. And that's just for starters.

That hardly represents an "isolationist" or other dismissable strawman argument. It represents a not terribly difficult to understand internationalist view widely held by experts in terrorism and regional diplomacy. It represents, point of fact, the proven correct analysis of the current conflict.

The whole piece is long but worth the time. Dismissing dissenters is cutting off an important set of viewpoints on how best to fight the much longer-term threat of terrorism, and right now is not the time to "stay the course" for its own sake...

(via Medley)