I know that nuclear proliferation is bad, but the proliferation threat from North Korea is not as high as some people might think.

Rather than just argue in a factual vacuum, let me just begin by linking the July 2009 Brookings Iraq Index. Read the numbers for yourself. Iraq’s security gains have been solid for two years and stable for a year, there has been a surge of optimism among the Iraqis, reconciliation is making slow but steady progress, and Iraq’s rebounding economy is starting to dry up the excess of young jobless men. You can always question what will happen next, but there’s no reasonable debate that there’s been significant and steady progress. And this, notwithstanding the fact that U.S. force levels are at their lowest of the war.

The interests of the United States were in removing Saddam as a threat (he’d invaded Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi, and attacked Israel) and eliminating the risk that he’d host and enable terrorists (he was financing Hamas, hosting the ’93 WTC bombers, and had invited in AQ) or supply them with WMD’s (which he’d previously used on multiple occasions and could easily have reconstituted, and was trying to reconstitute, since sanctions were dissolving). He had plunged his country into poverty, misery, and humiliation, and was creating a whole generation of people with nothing to live for but martyrdom.

It’s taken six years, but the odds now favor us meeting all of those interests. Saddam is dead, AQ is all-but-extinct in Iraq, the Shiite militias are a potential threat but subdued, and Sadr is widely discredited and has taken a beating in recent elections. The casualties are tragic, but certainly not more than Diane Feinstein, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry must have anticipated when they cast their votes (though Oranckay seems to suggest that Wolfowitz slipped them all rufies and manipulated their voting fingers while they were temporarily catatonic). I don’t think anyone wants a perpetual occupation, nor should anyone want Iraq to be the next Cambodia or Afghanistan. But when it was politically popular to say that we should surrender, flee, and leave Al Qaeda in possession of a third of Iraq, our least statesmanlike politicians were willing to seek personal political advantage in America’s defeat.

So where does this leave us? For approximately the cost we either anticipated or but for our own ignorance should have, we have a very good shot at leaving behind a reasonably stable, reasonably democratic Iraq that doesn’t threaten its neighbors, us, or its own population. Should we have gone in? The question is moot now, and it’s not even answerable without knowing how events would have played out had we not gone in. I’d guess Saddam’s compulsion for risk-taking would have made war for some reason or another inevitable by this time. Without the threat of Saddam, we don’t have to enforce a failing sanctions regime and no-fly zone, we can delink ourselves from the vile Saudi regime and remove our troops from their kingdom, and put Iran on the defensive to answer to its people. Moammar Khaddafy, no less, links Iraq to his decision to give up his nuclear program and expose the AQ Khan network, a gain that by itself made the war worth fighting. If we can manage to hold onto those gains until they solidify, wouldn’t those be significant gains for our interests and those of the Iraqis?

By my logic, invading other countries and toppling their regimes however undemocratic or brutal is generally not a good idea.

By your logic, we’d better keep KJI in power, after all, the devil we do know is better than the devil we don’t.

Myopic obsession with Iraq? Really? By whom? Democrats voted overwhelmingly voted to invade Iraq based on the Clinton-sponsored Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998.

We haven’t withdrawn completely from Iraq yet, so it’s still too early to know whether a non-threatening regime will remain in power or crumble under civil war and be replaced by a government as bad or worse than Saddam’s. There’s also the matter of whether or not the lives of the Iraqi people are better now than they were under Saddam. State-sponsored violence has been replaced by a combination of state-sponsored and internationally supported factional violence.

The difference is that the likes of Cheney were making a deliberate, all-consuming effort to find evidence of WMD programs in Iraq while the Bush II Administration was simultaneously telling the Israelis that there just wasn’t enough evidence that the structure in Syria was a reactor. The Americans went looking for stories of yellowcake in Niger based on questionable hints at best, said there were mobile missile launchers on truck trailers or whatever it was. They went after every lead. Meanwhile the Mossad had to get someone to bring back pictures of the inside of the structure in Syria to make their case and North Korea built several warheads. I’m not saying Iraq should’ve been ignored or not taken as a potential, or eventual, threat to civilization. But the myopic obsession was costly. At least in the case of the Syrian reactor there was an ally that was willing to go the extra mile.

Frankly, the argument that the Iraq War was a neocon enterprise is a pretty shaky argument to advance when Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act and 2/3 of the Congress, including about half of the Democrats, voted to authorize the war. Is everyone excused from leading us to war except a rather ill-defined clique the left now refers to as “neocons?”