printLawrence Auster has requested that I print the following:
Ilana,
I think you were out of line the other day when you referred to me as an “apologist” for the Iraq war. To call someone an “apologist” implies he is completely on board with something and is committed to defending it no matter what. To call me an “apologist” implies that I was acting out of partisanship or emotional identification and that I didn’t have a reasoned and critical basis for what I have argued over and over, which was (1) that we had reasons to believe that Iraq, a rogue regime, had WMDs, and (2) that given the existence of terror groups who would like to cause infinite damage to us if they could, we could not permit the Iraqi regime to continue in possession of, and continue developing further capacities in, WMDs which might be transferred to those terrorist groups. I also said prior to the war that I saw terrible things coming out of the war, but that I couldn’t see a way to avoid the logic summarized above that made the war necessary. That’s not being an apologist. That’s having a reasoned, and very reluctant, argument.
You could have described me as a person who supported the invasion for the reasons I have given. Given the huge number of criticisms and doubts I expressed about the war effort from many months before the war to the present moment, particularly my opposition to waging a war for the purpose of spreading democracy, for you to come out and call me simply an “apologist” for the war, period, as though I were an all-out champion of the administration in the manner of a Hugh Hewitt or a Rush Limbaugh, was not true or fair.
Lawrence Auster
Auster is definitely no Hannity, Hewitt or Limbaugh. If I gave that impression, it was unintended. However, because Mr. Auster’s “reasoned” position was palpably and patently flawed, violating objective reality, natural and international law, and the Constitution—he ought not to have held it. Iraq, in those good old days, was an economically desperate, secular dictatorship, profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. At the time of the invasion, it had acquiesced to inspectors (was in fact being criss-crossed by teams of them), hadn’t any ties to al-Qaeda or a hand in Sept. 11. It was a Third-World nation, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war. Iraq had no navy or air force. It was no threat to American national security. —ILANA