Dear Conservative

Dear Conservative Friend / Family Member,

I always hoped that my liberal postings would rile you up and force you to respond. In fact, my posts are more often than not written for / to you. But I think I was being too subtle. So now, I am going to write some posts directly to you.

On a recent road trip with two such conservatives (you know who you are) we had two lively debates. One was about urban poverty and the other about the Iraq War. My position on the war has changed to believing that being there was a mistake and that now is a good time to start withdrawing. The two conservatives disagreed, of course.

I'll admit that pulling out will be delicate. There is the possibility that violence could escalate again. I don't want to spend too much time debating this point though because whoever is President when troops begin to come home will have to watch what happens in Iraq and respond accordingly.

The main issue I want to debate is about whether we should have invaded, and when we should in the future. Each situation will be different from the one before it, but I think we can come up with reasonable guidelines while still being flexible enough to change if we have to. Our country would be much better off if we used our foreign policy to actually express our core principles. Too often in the past our foreign policy has been either morally bankrupt or completely hypocritical.

When it comes to deciding whether to invade, the primary reason has been and should remain whether the other country poses an imminent threat. Afghanistan obviously falls into this category. Iraq does not. Even if you allow for the fact that many intelligence services believed Saddam had a weapons program, nobody really thought there was an imminent danger to the US; a long term concern maybe, but not an imminent threat.

I know some would argue that you shouldn't wait until he has the weapons - which is when he will be more dangerous. I agree. But I think it is clear in retrospect that we could have waited longer. We could have given the weapons inspectors more time - given containment more time to work. Deciding when someone is an imminent threat isn't a science, but I don't think anyone believes we were at that point with Saddam.

It seems for some, a reason to continue believing the invasion was right is that we need a democratic role model in the Middle East. Granted, we need to acknowledge that this wasn't one of the main reasons for the invasion, but became the main reason when WMD's didn't materialize. Even so, the argument should be taken seriously. In fact, for a long time, I was right behind Thomas Friedman favoring this argument. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me anymore. We talk a good game when it comes to democracy, but we don't follow though. We tolerate Saudi Arabia - a very oppressive monarchy, and we ignore the results of Palestinian elections because we don't like who they chose (without even wondering why they chose them). If we are going to support democracy, we have to do it everywhere if we are to retain moral credibility.

Someone said in regards to this argument that Iraq was low hanging fruit. Maybe, but was it the lowest? Could we have supported a democracy in the Middle East without losing more than 4,000 American soldiers, tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees? I think we could have done a better job in Afghanistan (where Al Qaeda is making gains again), supported Lebanon - including stopping Israel's disastrous invasion, recognized Hamas' victory in Palestine - while keeping them on a short leash, and been tougher with Saudi Arabia. All of this could have been done without the disastrous consequences we see in Iraq.

This gets to my main point. Besides invading when there is an imminent threat, I think the only other time we should get involved is when the situation is bad enough that we can't likely make it worse and could conceivably make it much better. Iraq, at the time of the invasion, wasn't a model of human rights and democracy, but wasn't as bad as many other places around the world and certainly not as bad as it was before, and directly after, the first Gulf War. Under this reasoning, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq, but we would get involved in places like Rwanda, the Balkans, Sudan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I think if we were fighting to create more democracies and protect those under horrible dictatorships, as some (with memory problems) argue Iraq is about, there are better places to start.

What may end up happening over the next decade is Iraq could improve slowly, mirroring in some ways South Korea. If that happens, people might forget these disastrous years, as many forget the ups and downs of the Korean War. In fact, tens of thousands of Americans and South Koreans died, and we are still paying to have troops in South Korea. Yet this draws little protest and South Korea is seen as a success.

If this is the case, then I probably won't have a strong response. While I still believe that the costs to the Iraqis so far has been great - partly because of our mismanagement, I think that through containment and time, we might have achieved the same goal for the Iraqi people at a smaller cost to them and us.

So what do you think, unnamed conservative friend / family member? Care to weigh in?