American Conservative: We Need a Pinochet for Iraq

What does an American conservative do when the war of choice he supported goes badly? Read Jonah Goldberg’s latest column:

I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an Iraqi Pinochet would be even better than an Iraqi Castro.

Both propositions strike me as so self-evident as to require no explanation. But as I have discovered in recent days, many otherwise rational people can’t think straight when the names Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet come up….

Gen. Pinochet seized a country coming apart at the seams. He too clamped down on civil liberties and the press. He too dispatched souls. Chile’s official commission investigating his dictatorship found that Pinochet had 3,197 bodies in his column; 87 percent of them died in the two-week mini-civil war that attended his coup. Many more were tortured or forced to flee the country….

That’s 30,000 “many more” — and that’s what’s been reported. 100,000 were put in detention (source).

Why was it the United States went to war against Iraq, again? No, no, I’m not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Oh, right! Yes, yes, the new reason after that one didn’t work was that we went to war so we could close down the torture chambers and stop the killing. Now not only do the weapons of mass destruction turn out to be fictional, but the commitment to end torture and killing becomes fictional, too. In fact, Jonah Goldberg writes, some more torture and killing might be just the ticket.

Don’t go about your day thinking that a Pinochet for Iraq is just the agenda of conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg. The Iraq Study Group made a similar recommendation. The group was “bipartisan,” not representative, consisting of conservative Republicans like James Baker and conservative Democrats like Lee Hamilton. This conservative group says the goal for Iraq should be “a government that can defend itself, govern itself, sustain itself.” Not a democracy. Not a free country. A government that can get everything and everyone under its thumb. Translation: detention, torture, death. Jonah Goldberg was just the one to come out from behind the euphemisms.

Why do we need progressive leadership now and in 2008? Because the “pragmatic” remainder in politics is selling an agenda of detention, torture, and death.

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