The High-Risk Option

From Gerard Baker in the Times:

The critics of the war were right to say three years ago that it represented the high-risk option. There’s no doubt, as they said at the time, that not invading would have been the safer option. But over time, repeatedly exercising the easy option rarely produces long-term stability. By repeatedly deferring difficult decisions, repeatedly seeking accommodations with an ever more unacceptable status quo, we make the ultimate crisis that much larger, its consequences that much more devastating. The fluid of all those easy decisions crusts eventually into a hard carapace that can only be cracked with explosive force.

We would be making the same understandable but lethal mistake now if we were to decide that, in the teeth of the difficulties in Iraq, we should take the easy option and get out of there as quickly as possible.

Tony Blair famously said after September 11, 2001, that the kaleidoscope of geopolitics had been shaken. An alternative way to put it might be to say that we have opened a kind of Pandora’s box in the Middle East.

We have, surely, unleashed a violent fury of terrorism and guerrilla war that has a broader reach than Iraq or even the Middle East. But we have also unleashed the great virtue that in time will conquer these vices — not hope this time, though we could use some of that, but freedom. It would be a tragic mistake to cut our losses now, long before we have ensured that the virtue triumphs over the vices.