Friday, March 17, 2006

The Costs of War

In other, more serious, matters, foreign policy wiseguy Zbig Brzezinksi gave a speech today on the damage the Bush Administration has done to American leadership in the world. This bit--on the real costs of our adventure in Iraq--is nicely put:

The war has proven to be prohibitively costly. American leadership, in all of its dimensions, has been damaged. American morality has been stained – in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. American legitimacy has been undermined – by unilateral decisions. American credibility – particularly the case for the war, has been shattered. Leadership depends on morality, legitimacy, credibility. The economic costs of the war are escalating into hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, American casualties are in the thousands, with more than tens of thousands maimed. We are not even counting Iraqi casualties; we prefer not to know what they are.

Posted by jwb at 10:13 AM   

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said:

Hey John,

Just wanted to thank you for putting me on to the Brzezinski speech. Defintately the most cogent criticism of the war I have yet read. The lego links are pretty neat, too.
at 9:24 AM     

Anonymous Anonymous said:

Oh, I almost forget; I also wanted to return the favour by putting you on to one of the better commentaries I've read on the Danish Cartoon debate, by my favourite political columnist, Mark Steyn (a Canadian, of course):

http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=1482

There again, anyone who quotes Pericles in the opening line of his column has my attention.
at 2:52 PM     

Blogger jwb said:

Marty:

Thanks. I'll check it out, though I tend to think of Mark Steyn as a right-wing harpie/"see no evil" Bush supporter--not that there's anything wrong with that.
at 2:56 PM     

Anonymous Anonymous said:

Yeah, John, I know exactly what you mean. Lately, I find I agree with everything he has to say, EXCEPT his views on the Iraq war. Is he bought and paid for, or he just trying to suck up to the Bush regime?

That all having been said, there is still no better lance for the festering boil of end-stage liberalism than his particularly acerbic brand of political humour.
at 5:30 PM     

Blogger jwb said:

I was actually thinking--and may do a post on this topic at some point--that Steyn's views on the Iraq War are a small part of the great conservative crack-up now underway, caused, for the most part, by the need of otherwise intelligent people (such as Mark Steyn) to say nice things about George W. Bush regardless of whether he does anything worth saying nice things about.
at 7:40 PM     

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