Government Now Has George Will's Permission To End This War, Too

George Will is such a hot potato right now! BUT A SPINELESS POTATO? He received so much publicity for his other column a few days ago -- when he "stunned" Washington by "going Galt" and calling for an end to the millenia-old Afghanistan war, making him the first very serious important pundit to do so, ever -- that now he's like, "Iraq is also no good." Hmm where'd he get that idea? Probably the Huffington Post or Al Gore one of the other Internet places.

But what will intellectual smart serious educated conservative realist George Will write in his next column! Any thoughts about our troops in the Korean DMZ, too? Maybe... maybe get out of ol' Korea, too, after 60 years? A suggestion of this nature would easily land him five minutes on Anderson Cooper or whatever that night... or what about Saudi Arabia? Oh just kidding! No very important serious journalistic educated smart intellectual college-educated reasonable political scholarlyWashington Postcolumnist will ever write that because it is not serious about Security.

Thank you for reading this far. Maybe we should get on with the topic of George Will and Iraq. George Will has questioned the mission in Iraq for about three years now, which is a standard number of years to question such a war in such a place when one is a serious political columnist and scholar. Anyone who questioned it for longer than three years, of course, was never intellectual and educated about national security.

From today's important iteration:

If there is worse use of the U.S. military than "nation-building," it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples' politicians.

We had never fully considered the silliness of these aims and tactics until such a known national security human as George Will informed us, just now.

This is an important development in seriousness. In 2002, any serious person would not have believed such things. 9/11 had happened and national security was at stake because of Saddam Hussein and his nukes and his chemical agents and his government's very factual and indisputable secret meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague. Saddam Hussein was personally sending anthrax to Tom Daschle in the Senate, and George Will knew this, and was serious then too, and smart and college-educated and very literate, and told Charlie Rose these things about Democracy, on television:

I think the answer is that we believe, with reason, that democracy’s infectious. We’ve seen it. We saw it happen in Eastern Europe. It’s just — people reached a critical mass of mendacity under those regimes of the East block, and it exploded. And I do believe that you will see [in the Middle East] a ripple effect, a happy domino effect, if you will, of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies . . . Condoleezza Rice is quite right. She says there is an enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy. And there’s an enormous ahistorical error when people say, “Well, we can’t go into war with Iraq until we know what postwar Iraq’s going to look like.” In 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, did we have a clear idea what we were going to do with postwar Germany? With postwar Japan? Of course not. We made it up as we went along, and we did a very good job.

(And we're already leaving Iraq, dumbass.)

 Time to Leave Iraq [WP]