Iraq: nearing election time

From Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online:

The moral onus should have always been on the critics of the war. They should have been forced to explain why it was wrong to remove a fascist mass murderer...What is the real morality — trying a mass murderer and having him pay for his crimes, or engaging in legal niceties for years while the ghosts of his victims cry for justice?

Using that logic, President Bush would have to explain why he hasn't forcibly removed leaders of North Korea and a half-dozen African nations, since their actions have resulted in starvation and death by other means as well.

Kurds and Shiites support us for obvious reasons — no other government on the planet would risk its sons and daughters to give them the right of one man/one vote. They may talk the necessary talk about infidels, but they know we will leave anytime they so vote. After the December election, expect them — and perhaps the Sunnis as well — quietly to ask us to stay to see things through.

Hmmm. But will they ask us to stay? Earlier in the article, Hanson gives the standard spin about how [we] "will leave Iraq anytime its consensual government so decrees. " And given Judge Alito's track record on reapportionment (saying Baker v. Carr - the 1962 Supreme Court decision that essentially upheld "one man/one vote" - was incorrectly decided), it's possible Iraqis may enjoy something we may no longer have for too long.

George Bush may well go down in history as a less-effective leader than his father or Bill Clinton; but unlike either, he may also have a real chance to be remembered in that select class of rare presidents whom history records as having saved this country at a time of national peril and in the face of unprecedented criticism.

That sound is me puking.