The Dwellers in the Forest, Yet Again

By way of Josh Marshall, we find that yet another "liberal hawk" has dredged up that foul "flypaper" argument for invading Iraq:

What if the invasion of Iraq is having the unintended consequence of drawing terrorists and killers to that country, where our army can fight them on our terms? Supposedly bin Laden and a few others of his ilk trained thousands of fanatical followers. Though there have been awful terror strikes since September 11, world events have simply not reflected what might be expected to happen if thousands of fanatical terrorists were loose in the Western nations. Now there are said to be "foreign fighters" crawling all over Iraq, and whatever else is going wrong there, our military is killing significant numbers of armed fanatics, many of them not Iraqi. If we hadn't invaded Iraq and drawn them there, where might these guys be instead, and what harms might they be doing?

As I have written twice before, of all of the possible post-hoc rationalizations for the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, this is very nearly the most vile, ranking just above "Because we wanted to control their oil." Advocates of this position can maunder on about "foreign fighters" and "better there than here" all they want, and even if the actual facts on the ground didn't largely contradict them, there's one simple truth that they're ignoring.

The Iraqi people did not ask to be the bystanders, the injured, maimed, and killed, the "collateral damage" in our war with those "foreign fighters."

Any proponent of the "flypaper" argument shows that they regard the Iraqis and their children as somehow less than human, somehow less deserving of the same safety that they seek for themselves and their children. Now, it's my opinion that there are no reasons for us to be in Iraq which are both moral and true. There are reasons which I think could be moral if they were true, but using Iraq as the setting for a "flypaper" strategy is not on that list, and can never be. It is fundamentally immoral in its use of the Iraqi civilians as a means to an end.

I am emphatically not saying that our troops on the ground are morally equivalent to the nebulous "foreign fighters". Donald Rumsfeld is the only person I know who's making that argument. I am saying that I can think of fewer more noxious ideas than the notion that it's a good idea to use innocent people (remember, no WMD, no anti-American terrorist connections, no Iraqis on the jets that scarred our national psyche) as the backdrop for our war against an unrelated third group of people.

Comments

[DJW]

Yes, well done. Easterbrook's been working very hard to make himself impossible to take seriously, and I can't fathom why he hasn't completed his task. Pays to develop a reputation as a contrarian, I suppose.

Not only is the flypaper theory impossible to consider for anyone with a smidgen of a conscience, it presents a mental picture of Iraq as the equivalent of some sort of mousetrap. Once the terrorists wander in, hoping to find that delicious bit of cheese, SNAP! the door shuts behind them. If Iraq is so easy to get into, wouldn't it also be possible to make it out?

The flypaper theory is noteworthy in that it demonstrates just how far down the rabbit-hole of faulty and immoral logic defenders of Bush's foreign policy are forced to go to accomplish their grim task.