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Ms. Pollitt, you put your arguments so convincingly, elegantly, eloquently and comprehensively that one does really feel pity for Ignatieff and still irritated by the weekly bankrupt nag in Slate of the "secular" "intellectual" Christopher Hitchens.

Web Letter

Thank you, Katha Pollitt! It's been clear ever since former war supporters started to flip that they have never wanted to give any credit to the millions of us who got it right before the war ever started--perhaps they think of us as being comparable to the "premature anti-fascists" who bucked US foreign policy and fought fascism in Spain before fighting fascism was okay. One of the things that people like Ignatieff miss is that many of us who have the ideological baggage he complains of (the war is all about oil, never trust US foreign policy) are the same ones who wanted Hussein out back in the 1980s when the US was supporting him despite his human rights abuses. So whatever baggage we may have about US foreign policy or oil, it would be tempered by that other ideological baggage which was saying for twenty years: Get rid of the lousy, vicious dictator. But this was a case where I could put all of my ideological baggage away--be it the baggage that had long said Hussein should go, or the baggage that didn't trust the motives of the US--and vehemently oppose the war simply on purely practical grounds, linking arms with the likes of Norman Schwarzkopf and Anthony Zinni.

Indeed, this is the root of the continued concerns about Hillary's vote on the war--that, political considerations aside, she didn't have the judgment to see that it was a bad idea (as well as--oh, yes, of course--the fact that Bush was obviously lying about everything). As much as the Hillarys and Ignatieffs may want to paper it over, it does matter whether you could read the writing on the wall (the big, fat, boldfaced, underlined writing on the wall) from the beginning or whether it took you three or four years to be able or willing to read it. And while I'm happy to accept any and all converts, the least they could do when they convert is to acknowledge that the likely outcome of the war in Iraq was plain to see before it started and, unlike millions around the world, they just missed it.

Web Letter

Thank you, Ms. Pollitt, for saying what needs to be said so eloquently and well.