Smugness and being right

Jonathan Alter has an interestiing article on smugness in this week's Newsweek, pointing out how our smugness about the victory in Iraq may well prove to be our Achille's Heel.  One thing he notes is that apparently, there were suggestions made that we should fly in 3,000 MPs from Europe to help protect the supply lines and maintain order in Baghdad, but that Rumsfeld decided against doing so because the MPs would eventually have to be replaced by reservists, and if reservists had to be called up, it might be considered the same as admitting that we hadn't sent enough troops in the first place.  And Rummy wants us to believe that we didn't "allow" the looting to happen?  We did - and it looks like we did it to save his pride. 

He also talks about how difficult it is for either side in this war debate to admit when they're wrong.  He calls liberals to task for not being willing to admit that the pro-war side was right about the need to liberate the Iraqi people:

Let's be clear about the doves. They never said the United States wouldn’t win militarily; their objection was based on other factors (rejection of “preventive” war, botched diplomacy, etc.). And they may be proved right: history’s jury will be out a long time. Even so, I can’t get over how churlish the left has become. When did the liberals take the “lib” out of liberation? This was a totalitarian regime we’re talking about, with a boot on the face of the Iraqi people. The same folks who led the charge against fascism in Europe; who rightly spoke up against the U.S. government about “disappearances” in El Salvador and Guatemala; who carried high the banner of human rights—now they yawn at revelations of mass graves in Iraq and argue that the Iraqis will be no better off than before. Freedom’s just another word that liberals have figured out how to lose.

Now, so far, I haven't heard any on the anti-war side say that it's a bad thing that the Iraqi people are free - but I also don't recall gaining freedom for the Iraqis being very high on the pro-war side's long list of justifications for the war. Sure, they'd trot it out now and again to try and persuade those in the middle to support the administrations actions, but it was something they used more as a tool for persuasion and not as something they really believed was a significant goal of the war.

As for me, I do think that the Iraqis freedom is a good thing - a very good thing.  But as a justification for going to war, it's problematic.  There are many oppressive regimes around the world that we pay little or no attention to and do nothing about. If we were to start deploying our army to free every repressed people there is, we'd be stretching ourselves extremely thin.  I'm not indifferent to the suffering of people who live in such horrendous conditions, but I'm also a realist when it comes to just how much one country can do.

In any situation like this, there has to be a balancing of the benefits to humanity in general and the potential drawbacks of taking action. We also have to look at what other options are available.  Are there ways we could help the people in a repressed country take control of their own fate and support them as they overthrow their own dictator rather than going in and doing it for them? That's a question we never really asked about Iraq, as far as I know. 

I've never been much in favour of the US going in and overthrowing the governments of other countries.  Just as we can justify considering a government to be so heinous that they deserve to be kicked out, other countries can come with justifications to say that ours does, too.  I seriously doubt that there's any nation out there - or even a group of nations - that could really pose that big of a threat to us, but the principle is what's important.  We have to recognize that everything we say we can do to other countries, they can turn around and try to do to us - and if we keep making enemies at the pace we have been, they just might.