New Right Wing Talking Point on Iraq

The conservatives think they have come up with a new talking point but, as with most of their arguments about Iraq, it makes little sense. Jonah Goldberg posts a letter he received in The Corner:

Since your column the other day, I’ve been quoting you in my .signature, which as you know is a four-line tag that gets appended to everything I post in Usenet discussion newsgroups (and would get appended to e-mails I send, if I wasn’t temporarily using gmail).

The quote:
“Liberals used to be the ones who argued that sending U.S. troops abroad was a small price to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that genocide is a small price to pay to bring U.S. troops home.”

The letter goes on to report startling results, claiming this pushing liberals’ cognitive dissonance to new levels.”

If the first clue that this was nonsense was that this comes from Jonah Goldberg, the second clue is that they are substituting what is essentially a bumper sticker for rational argument. Decisions regarding war must be made based upon a rational review of the facts regarding the specific situation. In the case of Iraq, such a review has convinced many that it is the American presence itself which contributes to the instability. Supporters of remaining in Iraq indefinitely have yet to propose a course of action in which our staying would result in either greater stability or less bloodshed than our leaving over the next year.

The talk of genocide is simply an attempt to distract from the actual issues involved in Iraq by people who have been wrong about the war every step of the way. If preventing genocide was the real goal of the conservatives, we’d have been in Darfur a long time ago. The conservative argument has nothing to do with genocide and is all about finding bumper sticker rationalizations for the war when they have no good arguments and the facts are against them. The genocide argument provides no more rational for staying in Iraq than the earlier arguments based upon nonexistent WMD, terrorism, or spreading democracy.

Update: Jonah Goldberg calls for testing to prevent uninformed voters, but not uninformed columnists.

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