But don't get the wrong impression.
A day later Matthew Yglesias clarifies: "It still does seem to me that removing Saddam Hussein from office (at some point, in some way) was in the American national interest and that it was also be good for the people of Iraq. If there were an administration around that could have pulled this off in a reasonably effective manner, I think it would be an excellent thing to do".

You might possibly be right about Clinton's good motives in Kosovo, though I'm not so sure. But granting them, it is a little odd that his Administration armed Turkey with F-16's and other weapons which they used to commit Milosevic-like atrocities against their own Kurds. And on another topic, his Administration wouldn't have spent so much time defending the brutality of the sanctions on Iraq, but would instead have tried to develop "smart sanctions" from the very beginning. He wouldn't have waited until 1999 to do something serious about East Timor, where the US has much blood on its hands, and I believe that in Rwanda he didn't exactly cover himself with glory either.

This doesn't show that Clinton didn't have humanitarian motives in Kosovo--it just shows that whatever humanitarian motives Clinton might have felt, they were undoubtedly a secondary consideration or he'd have had a more morally consistent foreign policy.

"theology-driven incompetence"

Yes, God does work in mysterious ways.

"If there were an administration around that could have pulled this off [i.e. war and occupation] in a reasonably effective manner, I think it would be an excellent thing to do." -- Matt Y

It seems to me we ought to worry a little bit more about our own democracy. When a former general says that we'll probably soon have a military gov't, I think that's the time to say we need to cut back on the military, and advocating humanitarian interventions is an obstacle to that goal.

If the do-gooder itch needs to be scratched, how about campaigning for an end to subsidies for the Egyptian dictatorship, or the Israeli occupation, or the training of thugs in Colombia and a dozen other places? All of these policies hurt democracy abroad and at home.

In high school, there was this one kid, he was real bad. Everyone just knew he was guilty of lots of stuff he'd gotten away with, and would be up to more.

So we killed him.

That's what Bush sounds like.

Carl, 100% correct to point out our not-precisely-omniscient-nor-Hermesian Congress on saving our laws if some General decides to take over, inspired by General Franks.

I still argue that the fight wasn't Capitalism vs Communism, it was Elections vs Tyranny.

How do you ask a man to be the last one to be tossed into an industrial plastic shredder?

Someone 'argues' that Cold War era containment is effective against the threat of asymmetrical terrorist warfare these days. By that logic, our conventional armed forces together with our 'unconventional' nuclear arsenals and also the MAD doctrine of it-would-be-pretty-stupid-to-strike-first should have deterred the Islamofascists on 9-11. Or even Saddam before he invaded Kuwait. Well, that didn't work. At least we could militarily eject Saddam from Kuwait, but we could not put him out of business because of UN restrictions and Coalition sensibilities. Over the 90's it was pretty well documented just how uncontained and worrisome Saddam's activities were. Why did Clinton's Democrat Senators vote for an Iraqi regime change in the late 90's?

Should we have endlessly enforced the no-fly zones in Saddam's Iraq, keeping in mind that only the US and Great Britain were bothering to do this, and were taking fire? And of course we were blind as to what was going on in the rest of Iraq. There was virtually no oversight or control of Iraq's borders.

Or, perhaps this person is suggesting the mighty UN could effectively 'contain' a regime that defied its paper resolutions and corrupted the so-called sanctions. Charging the UN with containing Iraq is a ludicrously funny concept, especially now that we know about the extensive pay-offs Saddam made to politicians, journalists, businessmen and UN officials during the sanction and Oil-for-Food years.

We didn't ask for the 9-11 attack, We didn't ask for an unconventional enemy, either- these terrorists are both state-sponsored and independent. They are comprised of specific individuals whom we can keep hunting down, but they also arise out of a movement that has to be fought with ideas, a show of force on our part, and structural changes to their home societies. If the Iraq experiment fails to achieve a ripple effect of positive change in the neighboring fascist and oppressor regimes, then at least the Iraqi people aren't stuck with Hussein and sons. At least they can say they had a chance to make something better of their country and lives.

Leftists/neoisolationists seem to argue that no American troop's life is worth the attempt to increase our national security by bringing needed reform to a failed and violent region that exports terrorism. They contend that intelligence and police work will handle this 'situation'. Two things I would say to the police action alone mentality: The corrupt ME autocracies are churning out and financing fanatical killers faster than we can catch them, and they're not really cooperating with our police efforts inside their borders, obviously.

Second, aren't these leftist objectors the same ones whose litany has been to decry US "support" of corrupt regimes in the Middle East (as if all of Europe and the rest of the world didn't do oil business there, too!)? And, haven't the raving radical Middle Easterners complained for years that the political oppression there was somehow the fault of Satan America? Post-colonialism, oil politics- take your pick. The refrain of the blame-game was sung loudly there and even here in American universities.

Well, now we're doing something about it. Hope they seize the opportunity