A Public Prayer

While Ross Douthat is weeping over Teh Holy Fetus, the sickening fruits of the right's beloved war are available, via the trophy photos our soldiers took of their crimes. God bless our Facebook Generation, who thoughtfully chronicle their every move and mail their photographic evidence to their friends and family. The word "forever" never pops into their little minds, as they go from taking their shirts off for each other to ordering Iraqi women to do the same. I can hear the cheers of "Show us your tits!", just like at home, except for the automatic weapons. Well, maybe they have those at home too.

In wars people become brutalized and brutalize others. And not all of them die, of course. Some come home, our beloved heroes home at last, with all that expensive training and all these readily available American guns. They tortured and raped and murdered and now they're coming back home to your neighborhood, where everyone has forgotten about Iraq and there are no jobs and not enough social services.

Why did we invade Iraq, again? Why was the left called traitors for denouncing the American invasion of a foreign country? Why did we spend so much money, kill and displace so many people, destroy an ancient civilization that could have given us so much information about our common past? Let's ask the eminence grise of conservative intellectual thought, the best-selling author and enormously influential thinker, the frequent guest of Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg.

So how does all this, or the humble attempt at a history lesson of my last column, justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

All of you on the right who voted for Bush: You have no ideas. Your advice is useless. You were wrong, over and over and over. We are ashamed of you and of ourselves, but mostly you. Shut up and go away.