Democracy in the Mid-East

Fire of Liberty

Richard Brookhiser has a good column on Iraq and the reason why we're there in the first place in today's edition of The New York Observer. I'd say this about covers it:

The White House needs to remind us why we’re doing what we’re doing. We invaded Iraq because we thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He certainly hoped to get them, sooner or later, and I believe we will not know until the Assad estate is probated how close he had come. But W.M.D. were not our only reason for invading. We wanted to end an odious tyranny and to put a freer government in its place. We had already done that in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan is culturally marginal; nothing important has come out of there since the poet Rumi. Iraq is in the center of a world, sick with misgovernment and maddened by totalitarian fantasies of destruction and renewal. Those fantasies became real downtown. By changing the course of things in Iraq, we hoped to change the course of things in Iraq’s world, and to make our own more secure.

That about does it.