GEORGE WILL

Hard to imagine that this is the same George Will, Mr. "Sail the Imperial Ship of State Right over those Pathetic French Lilliputians." From Aaron Brown, tonight:

[BROWN:. . .] Let me ask you that question. Absent the evidence of weapons, were those other reasons good enough reasons for the United States to wage a war?

WILL: I'm inclined to think not.

John Quincy Adams famously warned the United States against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That Saddam Hussein was a monster is universally recognized. However, he is not the only monster in the world. And the question is, you have to connect, it seems to me, an American national interest with the ancillary and dispensable virtue of getting rid of monsters. Otherwise, we'll be much too busy.

BROWN: It seems to me, the argument the administration makes now is, well, we'll see on the weapons. We're not sure. We'll see. But this guy was such a bad guy and he killed so many people and he was so destabilizing in the region that the world is, in fact, better off. Is the world in fact better off?

WILL: Oh, I think the world is better off, if you mean, by some normal utilitarian calculus, that we have subtracted more pain and added more pleasure to the world, certainly, the world is better off. The world would have been better off if we had intervened in Rwanda and stopped the genocide there. There are questions of the overstretch of our capacity to do this, however.

There is another side, and a more interesting, a more promising side to the administration argument. And that is, not only is the world better off because we're rid of him, but there will be a positive good. We will have a transformative, exemplary society built in Iraq, which will be the first pluralist functioning secular democracy in the world and it will be a benign contagion that will infect the world with our values.

That's a large leap. It's an act of faith. It may be true. If true, it's wonderful. If not, then, retrospectively, you have to say, the war wasn't the productive enterprise we hoped for.

Two things: One, on humanitarian intervention, seems to me like Will is changing his tune a bit. In March, he pushed the humanitarian case for war hard (see his comments on Iraqi kids, here). Now it's pretty clear that he doesn't really care about it. I'm not particularly concerned about whether or not George Will thinks humanitarian intervention is a good idea, but now at least I know to be on the lookout for the strategic use of this argument from him.

Two, it's a little bland to say that we "hoped" for something "productive" from the war. (Forget about the "we" for the moment.) Unless "hoped" means "whipped ourselves into a frenzy over the need to get rid of a 'gathering danger' that mortally threatened our security." I hope that it won't be sleeting when I go back outside. "We" were whipped into a frenzy over Iraq. And now the evidence that would justify that frenzy is pretty darn hard to find.

MORE: Thomas Nephew argues that my characterization of Will is unfair, here -- partly because he finds his position "uncomfortably close" to Will's. Thomas then takes the opportunity to engage in some characteristically serious reflections on the broader issue at stake, namely, the justifications for the war as such. Just as a clarification: I took Will's piece from March to be addressed partly to liberal interventionists, who presumably would be touched by this argument: "remember a picture of an Iraqi child, suffering the effects of the current policy of "containment." At any rate, check out Thomas's piece.