INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 38: David Frum can't excuse the Iraq invasion.
INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 38: David Frum can't excuse the Iraq invasion.
THE WORST THING WE READ™
What If Someone Else Had Spilled an Even Bigger Sea of Blood?
THE INVASION OF Iraq doesn't really require that much reconsideration anymore. It was wrong; everything about it was wrong; any plan in the future that resembles it will also be wrong.
David Frum, who as a speechwriter for George W. Bush was an eager participant in doing the wrong thing, published a piece in the Atlantic marking the occasion of the 20-year anniversary of the invasion. That was a tricky sentence to write, because the natural inclination is to say Frum published a piece "about" the invasion or he "reflected on" the invasion or he "looked back at" the invasion, and none of those things are true. The invasion remains, for Frum, as unexamined as it was in 2003, and the Atlantic remains as willing as ever to promote that non-examination.
As anyone irate enough to read a David Frum piece about Iraq noted immediately, every sentence of Frum's opening paragraph, under the headline "What If the U.S. Hadn't Invaded Iraq in 2003?", was a lie:
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