There were scenes on TV last night of soldiers who’d served in Iraq being reunited with their families that were reminiscent of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic photo of a sailor embracing a gal in Times Square on V-J Day. Of course, we aren’t celebrating Iraq with quite the wild euphoria-but the United States can be proud that we did not cut and run in Iraq, as so many wanted to do:
The classic lament about the war in Iraq is that it achieved little at a huge cost in American lives, treasure and reputation. That view rests on a kind of amnesia about the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime, his 12-year defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, the threat he posed to its neighbors, the belief-shared by the Clinton and Bush Administrations and intelligence services world-wide-that he was armed with weapons of mass destruction, the complete corruption of the U.N. sanctions regime designed to contain him, and the fact that he intended to restart his WMD programs once the sanctions had collapsed.
The Wall Street Journal editorial goes on to say that we’ve helped Iraq establish a republic, “if they can keep it.” Isn’t it time to remember the guy whose guts made it all possible?