Why? Opponents of the war necessarily supported the continued reign of the Iraqi despot. The opposite of "regime change" is the status quo -- or worse. Much more unsettling is the fact that for Clark and Schlesinger, among other liberals who bewail the absence of what Clark calls "international legitimacy," critical and moral faculties turn not on immutable standards of fair play and self-preservation, but on such fickle expediencies as "multinational" consensus -- or animus toward George W. Bush.
This rationale seems to be enough for some people. In a slurpy paean to Wesley Clark, Yale's Harold Bloom declares in The Wall Street Journal that because Gen. Clark saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo, he's the man for our times. (Given that George W. Bush saved that many Muslims and more by deposing Saddam Hussein, perhaps the Yale lit light should reconsider his endorsement.) Bloom also declares his anti-Saddam bona fides: "I trust it is clear that I am not deploring our deposing of Saddam Hussein, though its motivations remain obscure."
Maybe the 2003 "Military Balance" report issued by the International Institute of Strategic Studies this week will clarify things. Among the findings of the London-based think tank is its assessment, noted by the Associated Press, that the war in Iraq "hurt al-Qaeda by denying it a potential source of weapons of mass destruction and discouraging states such as Syria and Iran from supporting it." WMD threat and mass butchery aside, this is Objective A in the war on Islamic terrorism. And who -- besides Wesley Clark, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Arthur Schlesinger, et al. -- could ask for anything more?
Such scholarly confirmation of the logic on the ground should help solidify the recent rise in the president's job approval ratings. American achievements in Iraq, as delineated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq's civilian administrator, won't hurt either: 13,000 new reconstruction projects, 40,000 new police officers, 22 million vaccines, 4,900 Internet connections, 1,500 school renovations and more electricity generated than before the war -- not to mention freedom from torture and freedom of speech. Small wonder, really, that the Senate is going the president's way on Iraqi aid; that Turkey has decided to send troops into Iraq after all; that Japan is finally kicking in some cash to the reconstruction effort. A new Gallup Poll may provide the most significant development of all: Seventy-one percent of Baghdad residents say they want U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for an extended period.
All of which may be bad news for Democratic presidential candidates, but it's a big lift for everyone else.