The big picture

Wow, I’ve been back in the States a couple of days now, and I haven’t posted anything on Iraq.

To be honest, having taken an enforce break from it, I was kind of hesitant to pick up that banner again. It’s such a tiring effort in the face of what feels like short-sighted, misguided, or (on occasion) plain evil blather, over and over and over again. The same things have been said, back and forth, so frequently, to so little effect, that I’d rather just let events take their course and t’hell with it.

Well, fortunately, some folks don’t feel the same way, so I feel obliged to post this article which, I think, sums up the present case as well as anything else.

The answer is that it’s about all of those things together. What makes Iraq unique is not that it’s a brutal dictatorship, that it has terrorist ties, that it sits on gobs of oil, that it’s invaded its neighbors, or that it’s used weapons of mass destruction to wipe out people whenever it saw fit — no, what makes it unique is that all these things apply.

It’s called the big picture — and picking apart just one part of it, even if possible, does little to dismiss the whole. To some degree, this as been abetted by the Bush administration not talking about the big picture side of it, either because it keeps getting dragged back into the particulars, as though each one must suffice for war, or because it raises some implications (discussed in the comments to the article) that would themselves raise some irrelevant but difficult arguments.

It’s time to get on with it, and shift the argument to how best to clean up the mess afterwards.