David Ignatius, quoting another columnist today in his own column ("Iraq Can Survive This"):
Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star, wrote a column yesterday, "Preparing for a shipwreck in the Middle East," in which he cautioned: "The American adventure in Iraq -- creative, bold and potentially revolutionary -- threatens to sink under the weight of a Sunni insurgency that has fed off the Bush administration's frequent incompetence in prosecuting postwar stabilization and rehabilitation."
Ignatius' larger point is a good one: letting Iraq go the route of Lebanon in the 70s and 80s is just putting the country on ice in terms of political development, while the killing goes on and troublemakers the world over benefit from the ensuing loose security rule set that defines the country for the length of the sectarian violence.
You can say: we don't take down Saddam, we don't have to deal with this. But frankly, that's a cop-out. There will always be these places to deal with inside the Gap until we shrink the Gap. Saddam's many sins just gave us the excuse to actually take a job on, rather than just come up with the usual excuses like we do with North Korea, Sudan or Zimbabwe. These situations will not go away from criminal neglect on our part.
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